


Stained Glass Roses

by Ladyboo



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blood, Boys In Love, Child Abandonment, Child Neglect, Christianity, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gun Violence, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, Involuntary cannibalism (temporarily), Language of Flowers, M/M, Mute Sam Winchester, Past Child Abuse, Patricide, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Season 1, Selective Muteness, Sibling Incest, Smoker Dean Winchester, Tattooed Dean, Underage Prostitution, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-04-24 08:21:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 75,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14351625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladyboo/pseuds/Ladyboo
Summary: "You can have an entire conversation with flowers, Dean, you just have to know the right ones to pick.""That so, Sammy?""Yeah."





	1. Mourning Bride

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saintsurvivor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintsurvivor/gifts).



> So, this is a monster of a piece, first off. Second off, this is entirely unedited, so there's going to be a shit ton of mistakes. It's going to be a behemoth, I already know it is, and updates on it might be a little slow? But, its something that I wanted to do, and I've got everything all tapped out note wise, so it's just going to be the process of actually getting it written. That said, this is going to hurt. This story is going to hurt a lot before it gets better, and I'm going to apologize now for the fact that it might make you cry.  
> Enjoy it though, and tell me what you think!

Blood had caked beneath his nails, at least six hours dry and stained into his skin where he never quite managed to scrub it all away. Not enough time, not enough care and it built there, so dead it no longer looked red and crackling against his skin, finally washed away only when he chewed on the ends of his fingers when research caused him to stare at a computer screen so long his eyes crossed. It spread across his tongue then, oxidized copper that tasted like too many pennys between his teeth, but he’d stopped caring if it was his or not months ago.

This blood though, this blood was new, this blood was fresh, this blood he knew in part to be his. It seeped from between his fingers, skin pulled back together tight and thin from practice alone despite the way his side had been butterflied open. The wound wasn’t as deep as he’d expected, comparatively shallow for all that it burned with every breath that he took with a reverberating ache. He twisted though, turned his chest a little more and stretched his skin a little further, the mirror on the wall making it easier to spear the needle through his skin than it would have been if he’d tried in the car. 

Familiar motions to match a familiar feeling, inhaling when he pulled the thread tight and exhaling on every new puncture, a tight, neat row of stitches slowly took shape along the curve of his side just above his hip. It would scar if he wasn’t careful, flesh raised and red and bleeding sluggishly from between the runs of thread, vibrant red that would seep quick against the soft, summer sun colored twine. Another scar then, another mark and another reminder that he was still alive, still breathing, still screaming on the inside. 

String knotted off, side sewn back together and his body whole if still empty, Dean used the sharp of his closest knife to cut off the extra. It fell to the floor in a slow motion and he watched it with the side of a knuckle caught between his teeth to suck away the blood there. He’d cut that open too, caught it on the black dog’s lower teeth where his silver knuckles had slipped mid punch and he sighed, left the thread where it had fallen and went for the shower instead. He would need a new shirt, blood was easy enough to get out of fabric but he didn’t have the time to mend every piece of clothing. The old one had torn, familiar fabric shredded up the side by the same claws that had torn their way through his skin but it would make for good bandages if nothing else, the faded grey fabric would be easy enough to tear into strips and keep in the car. 

He left it on the bathroom floor for the time being, pausing at the sink if only for something to lean against while he pulled his belt free with a crack, while he shoved at the waist of his jeans with red stained fingers. 

The water was hot though, a reward for a hunt done well and a silent plea for forgiveness from his aching shoulders and his stiff muscles all at once. His head bowed beneath the stream, his right hand braced against the wall and Dean sighed. His body slumped forward then, a slow sag of his shoulders and his spine and his arm bent, forehead pressed to the cool shower wall. His mouth found a familiar home along the solitary bloom of that tulip then, pressed to the inside of his arm in its monochrome quiet with its stem that sliced a path down his wrist. He couldn’t taste the ink anymore, not like he had been able to in those first few weeks but he knew the taste of it still all the same. He gave a kiss there though, nothing more than a press of his mouth to his own skin but simmering with a familiar, yawning hurt even still. 

Reminiscent of forehead kisses few and far between, of ruffled hair and laughter that he knew the echo of low in his chest, but those were naught but memories now. His free hand speared water through his hair instead, nails blunt across his scalp and there was a faint ache there, tender and soft from a hunt a few states south. The water cut paths across his skin, washed against him with a warm cradle that gave him a forgiveness that he never managed to offer to himself as it pulled away the dirt and sweat and blood. 

He stood there then, mouth pressed to ink over a year dry and Dean kept his head low until the water started to turn tepid. He tipped his face into it then, let it fall across his lashes and his sun darkened cheeks, scraped a hand across the rough where he hadn’t shaved in what would soon be a week. He washed the blood from his skin, from his mouth, and Dean pressed at the dial only when it turned cold, twisted the knob so the water stopped only when it bit icy teeth into his skin. The water had taken some of his recently acquired warmth with it, but the bathroom was thick with steam when he emerged from the shower stall and the towel that he grabbed was clean enough even if it felt rough against his skin. 

He scrubbed at his hair with it, harsh motions that chased the water away in moments and he dragged it down his chest, wide sweeps even as he avoided the fresh, neat row of stitches with their sunshine thread.

Heavy, hot from the water, his amulet rattled between his collarbones when he moved and he would need a new chord for it soon, leather gone soft and thin.

He needed clothes, he needed to load up his equipment and he needed to get on the road before he got comfortable, before he got anxious. Towel tossed behind him toward the sink counter, Dean took a new shirt from his duffel, faded until the forest green had turned a muted olive. He caught his reflection then, arms raised to stuff it over his head and a familiar flash of black gave him pause, just as it always had. 

Smooth script, a fat bottomed, wide  _ s _ and the fluid carelessness on the  _ a _ and the lean of the  _ m _ , he knew his brothers handwriting like he knew his own, and it had been easy enough to have the tattoo artist pull that name from a birthday card he still hadn’t thrown away. He knew his brothers name like he knew his own, and carried between the groove of two of his ribs, Dean held Sam close, pressed beneath his left arm like he couldn't anymore, like he hadn’t in some time. 

A slow inhale, transfixed, and Dean’s mouth pulled thin, his eyes burned faintly before he tugged the soft cotton down until Sam and his love were kept close and safe, until Sam and his memory were guarded and coveted.

_ “Fuck.” _

A waver to his voice, thick, and Dean turned, pulled at cotton briefs and jeans and took them to his flesh like they were armor. Boots then, laced over socks that shielded from view the cypress leaves that ringed his ankles like shackles. Reminders, omens, totems and quiet, unvoiced prayers both for an atonement that he would never recieve and the want to never forget, Dean clothed himself as he did every time and held against his skin the desperation of a love he would never know.

The hangman's weight of leather against his shoulders, he knew the leather jacket like a home and he wore it then, undone if only for how he felt like his heart may beat out of his chest. He went through the motions though, stuffed ruined clothes into a bag to be disposed of at least three counties over and bundled his knives and guns away in their appropriate duffle. He would clean them later, would strip them apart and grease them like they deserved, but he needed distance now, needed space between himself and the bodies of those he hadn’t been able to save. Another few fingers to add to the tally, and he never remembered their names, not after at least two states and ten cases, but he remembered their faces. And he would remember these two faces, the ten year old girl that had gone missing and the way her foolhardy eighteen year old brother and guardian had been desperate to find her. Dean couldn’t help people when they didn’t listen to him though, couldn’t save people who got themselves killed because they didn’t pay attention. 

He couldn’t keep letting people down, not like this.

Fifteen minutes and the night air was cool on his face, on the damp of his hair. Three duffels and a bag to be tossed when he got the chance went easy into the trunk, and he hesitated there only after he had slammed the lid. Leaned against cool metal with spread palms and a low hanging head, watched the flicker bright of purple neon where it flooded a rhythm across his skin. 

He felt timeless then, hollow within himself and for the breaths that he took, wasted words on a mouth that frowned with the want of another that he would never know. Color across his skin, illuminated and ephemeral, effervescent in the way that it make the acid curdle of anxiety wake within his veins. It made him look alive then, made him seem like something else, more than just the dead hearted wraith he had become, the dug out grave he had made of himself. Fitting then, fitting that he would look just as torn apart and empty as he felt, and there was a shame to be had from the false blush of color that the neon gave him.

He pushed himself off the hood with a grunt, heavy foot falls and tired, weary bones carrying him as he traced a loving hand over the roof of the impala. Home there, familiarity and comfort there in the night damp glide of his hand across cool metal and he could almost see the ghost haze silhouette of another across the roof if he squinted. Too much empty space in the cab, the kind of leg room and quiet that he lived with now, and Dean gripped the wheel with a punishing tight that made his knuckles ache. He peeled out of the parking lot then, pointed west and desperate to get away from Carthage and its cotton dream familiar streets and its still water memories.

-

_ Summer in New York wasn’t supposed to be this hot. Upper state, Carthage was smaller than he’d expected from a place like New York, sleepy in that just this side of dirty kind of way. They even had a house this time, two bedroom and small with a stove that sat a little lopsided and a fridge that rattled. They had food though, supplemented by the job he’d taken in the mornings at the local garage because he was seventeen and he could, and their bills were paid on time with how Sammy had carefully budgeted out the money John had left them.  _

_ But John had left them here at the tail end of May, and Sam had gone loose limbed and relaxed in a way that Dean hadn’t seen since two springs back at Blue Earth, and Dean just didn’t have the heart to tell him otherwise. _

_ A wide yard to go with the small bedrooms and the small kitchen, acres of soft, green grass speckled with trees before it morphed into the rest of the woods. The treeline was thick, but the sun was high and the air was warm, and Sam hadn’t been inside when Dean got back from his shift at noon. Salt lines undisturbed, no signs of a struggle, the back door had been left wide open, and he had known that body out in the yard. _

_ Like Sam had thrown himself into the grass, and Dean could just imagine him leaping off the back porch, tumbling past the rickety steps and launching himself into the grass just to get out. He’d stretched himself out, bare feet in the air and his belly to the grass. The gym shorts he wore were a size too wide in the waist, pulled tight and puckered with the drawstring even from what Dean could see. Just the same, his tank top was too long in the chest, wide necked where it threatened to fall off one of Sam’s sun golden shoulders, he wondered where the kid had left his shoes this time.  _

_ It did him good though, to see his brother like that. They could be boys here, they didn’t have to be soldiers, they didn’t have to be Winchester’s. They could just be Sam, Sam and Dean with no expectations upon their shoulders and no accusations that they hadn’t done enough.  _

_ Laid out on his belly, there was a thick book near his left arm, held open only by its own weight. Sam seemed intent on the plant in front of him though, swaying stalks and purple flowers that Dean didn’t recognize, and he walked closer, watched as Sam’s attention went from the plant instead to a hardcover book that Dean couldn’t quite make out the pages of.  _

_ This wasn’t the sort of thing that John had wanted them to do, but Dean thought they did enough. They ran in the mornings, five miles before the sun even came up and they went through the training drills John had branded into their skin just the same as they would have if he were there before Dean went to the garage and Sam went to the library. They kept busy, they kept up on their skills, they seemed normal in a way that Sam took to like breathing and it made Dean ache for him.  _

_ “Whacha got there, Sammy?” _

_ Fox slanted eyes found him, peeked out from beneath the loose curl of dark brown hair, and he had missed the toothy curl of Sam’s smile. It had been lost for a few days, vanished beneath the sullen pull that only a thirteen year old could ever really manage and no matter what trick he had tried, he hadn’t been able to bring back that smile. Something had though, someone else had managed where he himself had failed, but Dean only felt relief.  _

_ He sat beside his brother in the grass then, oil stained into his skin and engine grease beneath his nails, and smiled at the way that Sam watched him. A little weary, a little leary if only for the way that Dean was dirty, but he could see the hardcover book then, a journal with crisp, narrow lines on the pages that Sam had ignored in places to instead fill with careful, meticulous drawings. A neat rendition of the plant before him, one single flowering stalk with faint shading at the edges like he’d gotten bored, and Dean tipped his head a little further until he could make out the words.  _

_ Verbena, good for headaches and snake bites. _

_ “You into plants now?” _

_ His nose curled and Sam watched him from beneath his bangs. The sun had pressed freckles into his cheeks, to his nose and his throat and Sam looked young then in a way that they weren’t allowed.  _

_ “Bethany at the library gave me this book. She said it’s good for boys to know this sort of stuff.” _

_ He motioned toward the open faced book where it lay in the grass and Dean only just refrained from picking it up at the sharp look that Sam gave him. He held his hands up instead in a show of surrender, waggled his fingers and watched his little brother’s mouth purse. “It’s a dictionary for the uses and meanings of flowers and herbs and trees and stuff. It’s even got little paragraphs of their history.” _

_ Sam had that look though, that quiet eyed, tense shouldered, reproachful kind of look. Like he expected Dean to say something, like he expected disapproval and a harsh bark that he needed to get back to important things. There were guns to strip, there was latin to memorize, Sam should have known better. But Dean knew better, knew how much Sam needed things just as much as he needed to see Sam happy, so he made a curious sound in the back of his throat instead.  _

_ So he leaned forward instead, tapped at the book with a clean knuckle until it turned enough that he could read it. It was informative, the kind of thing that he expected his brainiac of a little brother to read, latin words and delicate looking drawings, diagrams showing specific parts of the plant like the stamen and the pistil and the uses that the flowers had versus the leaves, the roots. With that though there were poetic sentences, explanation of what the plant meant, an entire language that he hadn’t previously known.  _

_ “This is cool.” _

_ Sam watched him with those eyes, lidded against the sun and colored with a hesitance that had become all too familiar in the last few years. He was thirteen now, he could hunt now, John could use him as bait now and did, often, more so than Dean ever felt comfortable with. He could still remember the way that werewolf in Georgia last november had tried to chew his baby in half, the way John had hesitated on his shot, the sticky wet blood beneath his hands. He could still remember the way Sam had screamed, reedy and animalistic, panicked and pained.  _

_ Sam watched him now though, leaned into him with the same companionship and trust that he always did, and Dean smiled.  _

_ His wide, full mouth pursed, he could see the way that Sam chose his words carefully, and he cursed John then for all the ways that their father had tried to stifle the younger, for all the things he did to try and make Sam the perfect little soldier. Dean fit the mould well enough for the both of them, Dean followed orders and marched his way through training, through the hunts, through the alcohol scented screaming, he did enough for the both of them. Sam deserved books if they were what he wanted, Sam deserved flowers if they made him smile like that. He would keep marching if it meant Sam got to have what he wanted, even if only for a little while.  _

_ “Yeah?” _

_ He hurt then for how small his brother sounded, how unsure, and Dean reached out despite the oil and grease on his palm and under his nails. He ruffled his fingers through Sam’s hair, bangs pulled back until he could see those golden fox sharp eyes and he smiled at the way that Sam leaned into his touch. Like he trusted him, like there was never any doubt or question within him to trust Dean, and he’d never known anybody to trust him like Sam did, had never bothered to care if anyone other than Sam did.  _

_ “Yeah! You like it, right?” _

_ Sam nodded and he grinned, rattled his brother with a shake of his head just to watch the way that Sam laughed and swatted at him.  _

_ “You’re the smartest person I know, Sammy. You always find interesting stuff, course this is cool. Like, here- what’s this one mean?” _

_ Sam ducked beneath his hand, twisted around until he was belly up in the grass and he stared at Dean for a minute like that, sun squinted eyes and a toothy grin on his freckled face, dimples cutting into his cheeks. He scrambled upright then, and Dean leaned back to avoid the way that one arm flew out with how Sam scooped up the library book and stuffed it into his lap. Long legs folded up and bent, he pulled his own journal close then, between their feet so Dean could see both, could see how Sam had left out history to instead put emphasis on location and proper cultivation, how to dry and store each plant.  _

_ “This is verbena. The Chinese used to experiment with it for things like blood diseases? Now hippies use it for things like bruises and infections and bites, and it seems to work really well. Witches probably use it to, but I can’t exactly ask one. You only use the leaves and flowers though, I haven’t found if the roots are safe. I think I’ll need another book for that.” _

_ He traced a finger across the page as he went, gave Dean something to follow for all that he listened with rapt attention. He looked up then, from the book to Sam’s face, and caught his little brothers smile.  _

_ “Verbena means enchantment, to be enchanted. One of its uses was as a component in love potions, but it just smells like grass, so I don’t get why.” _

_ There was sunlight on his lashes, his hair, turning everything about Sam golden then. Golden fox eyes and an upturned nose, a soft, smiling mouth, with the sun having kissed freckles into his skin and his tanktop having finally fallen off of one shoulder. He looked otherworldly like that, sunlit holy and faerie fantasy splendor, and Dean wanted to reach out. Damn everything, but he wanted to press his mouth to the sun hot crest of those shoulders. He wanted to give kisses to those shoulders, he wanted to trace his fingers across the freckles on Sam’s cheeks and kiss them where they had taken root along his collar and throat. He wanted to kiss that mouth and taste the way that Sam smiled, and he felt breathless then, felt dizzy.  _

_ Because Sam was beautiful, summer pure and sun bright in a way that Dean wasn’t ever allowed, and he wanted like he never had before. He wanted to wrap himself around the other and feel Sam breath against his chest, wanted to be the only thing that Sam ever needed. A consuming feeling, and for all that it made his head spin, Dean smiled through something an awful lot like fear. Because he knew that he wanted what he could never have, that he ached for something that their father would kill him over, or worse yet, take Sam away over.  _

_ “What else is there?” _

_ Summer in Carthage was hot, hotter than he had expected, but Dean felt like he burned hotter still when Sam smiled at him like that, because he was in love and there was nothing he could do about it.  _

-

He had headed south.

He didn’t know why he ever went south. 

Three days spent winding around Interstate 81 through mountains that made his ears pop and two nights spent sleeping in the cradle of his car. Aimless until southern Pennsylvania when a news paper in a diner told about trout season and how another fisher had gone missing near Cripple Creek. Statistics on the bear population and a brief note on how hikers and travelers should be careful this season, and it was enough to send him south. 

It should have been enough to send him west, send him packing, he should have known better. He never took hunts in the south, never trusted the dark looming forests and the sulfur swamps when there was nobody to watch his back. Not since Caleb, stupid, arrogant, impatient Caleb and the way that Dean could still remember the way that he hadn’t listened like he needed to, the way that he had bled out in a back alley in Altamahaw because Dean could do a lot of things, but his hands couldn’t press a torn out throat back together. He avoided the south just like he avoided the rest of the hunter community, just like he had kept his head low and his guns hot since he’d burned John’s corpse two years ago. 

Wytheville was pretty though in the way that mountain towns were, buildings tucked into a shallow valley and rolling horizons of green that swallowed up the streets with swaying trees. He rolled into town half past ten, hungry in the pit of his stomach and quick to find somewhere to park. The only closest diner in town looked sleepy enough, a few cars in the lot and a few people visible through the windows, and he gave the waitress a practiced, tired smile when the door rattled shut behind him. 

“Just you this mornin, honey?”

“Afraid so, ma’am.”

She nodded like she had expected as much, bright eyes and fat ashen blond curls that tumbled loose around her shoulders. She smiled at him though, little notepad held to her wrist and tipped her head toward the rest of the dining room. 

“Coffee?”

“Please.”

A pop of her gum but she smiled still, clucked her tongue at him past her pink bubble chew. 

“Go seat cha’self, I’ll get the fresh pot.”

She swayed away from him then, left him to find himself somewhere to sit, and he took a booth near the window. Nobody behind him for all that he didn’t press his back into the wall, and he looked out at the rest of the dining room with hooded eyes and a yawn on his tongue. Head in hand then, tipped forward in an aborted motion to take the menu that ended instead with a sigh, Dean scrubbed blunt nails across his scalp. 

It was quiet here, it was peaceful here, a satin soft kind of comfort that wrapped itself around his bones and Dean let himself sink a little further into the booth. 

The clink of a coffee cup on the table brought him back to life, and he leaned back to look at the waitress again. Old enough to be his mother, her hair wasn’t quite right even if their curls were the same and Dean watched her with a charismatic camouflage in the way that he smiled, how he turned the green of his eyes on her. Blue jeans, they didn’t seem to care for uniforms here, she was approachable in denim and a cool lavender tee, the casual kind of friendly that he found from time to time in towns that were small enough, sleepy enough. 

“You got any idea what you want?”

Mouth pressed together, he shrugged, he smiled at her and let his gaze drift back to the menu for just a moment. 

“Whatever you suggest.”

She popped her gum again even as she wrote something down, even as she scribbled her pen across that little pad. Three patrons near the door, two at the counter, one woman and three men apart from the waitress and whatever cook was back in the kitchen. Older than him even if just barely, middle aged at most and he took them in with a quick glance. 

“Ain’t never seen you in here before. Just passin’ through or you stayin’ for a few?”

Her words were slow, thick with an accent that he was going to have to get used to. It took him a moment to understand what she meant, and Dean blinked at her. He was tired, his skin ached from a too tight tension and his bones hurt from being on the road, but she was as patient as she was nosy. 

“Staying, sort of. My Dad’s fishing up near Cripple Creek, I was supposed to meet him two days ago but work got away from me.”

She hummed, and she seemed friendlier still then, something smoothed out and sweet to her smile. She left the coffee pot on his table, full and steaming still and it was all he could smell. 

“Your Daddy picked a good spot, we got water full a trout this time a year and it’s good fun long as you’re careful of the bears. You got a name?”

“Robert Colwan, ma’am.”

Fratricide, madness, a devil on his heels and death on his breath, grave dirt in the hollow of his ribs and pressed into his gums. 

Dean smiled, fingers curling around the coffee cup while the waitress rested one hip against the table. Her perfume smelled sweet, crisp like artificial apples over the grease and oil of a kitchen well used but she wore it well. Quiet chatter from the rest of the dining room, the sounds of something frying back in the kitchen and low tones of music that he couldn’t quite catch from the ancient looking jukebox over by the register. 

“Lorna Fray. I’m here every day but Sunday’s, you come in and see me anytime you like. I’ll make sure to get some meat on them bones. Ain’t ever gonna feed you somethin’ you won’t like, our stuffs all house made, meats all local, never had an unhappy customer.” 

A wink and she was off, swaying away from the table with the same unhurried walk she’d come with. 

The first drag of his coffee turned into half the cup in one single swallow, scalding on his tongue and bitter hot on his throat. He wouldn’t taste anything for at least three hours, but he didn’t eat much for taste anymore, hadn’t since the better half of his soul had walked out in southern Louisiana without a backward glance. One more ashen meal wouldn’t kill him, not when nothing else he had encountered in life since seemed to be able to. 

He refilled his own coffee mug and drained it by a third before Lorna came back, but she just slid a loaded oval plate onto the table before sashaying past, new customers at the door and a friendly, familiar greeting on her mouth. Small towns, tight communities, he would never get used to places where everybody seemed to know everybody. It put a bitter taste in his mouth, something he called irritation so he didn’t have to admit that it was longing and lonely, and Dean watched the interaction over the rim of his mug for a moment before cutting into his food. 

Three hotcakes, four pieces of bacon, two links of sausage, a mound of scrambled eggs and a crisped sheet of hashbrowns, he didn’t necessarily taste it for all that he could smell it. Systematically, he cleared the plate in ten minutes, pausing only to drink his coffee and give covert glances around the diner. He finished the pot in another three, liquid fire in his belly and his tongue burnt, but he didn’t have time to stand before Lorna was back, hip tipped against the table while she popped her gum at him. 

“Well, you’re sure in a hurry, ain’tcha?” 

Laughter in her voice, and she tore off a ticket for him with his total. It was comfortable here, part of him wanted to stay here. He hadn’t been comfortable in a long, long time, but Dean just smiled back, just glanced at the ticket before pulling a ten and a five from his wallet. 

“Dad hasn’t checked in like he was supposed to, I’m a bit worried. Gonna see if I can meet up with him, or at least head out to Cripple Creek and see if anybody’s heard where he went. Keep the change Lorna, hope I’ll see you again before we leave town.”

She smiled at him, white teeth and laugh lines on her face, picked up the money and his ticket without a smidge of hesitation. 

“You do that honey, nicest stranger we’ve had blow through here in weeks.”

The air outside was warm enough, just enough that he could take his jacket off, just enough that he could toss it into the passenger seat. A shadow so he could pretend for a moment that he wasn’t so alone, a falsehood meant only to pacify himself for all that he wanted to take the amulet between his teeth and Dean brought the impala to life, coaxed out of the lot at a respectable speed that made his skin crawl. There was no speeding to be had here no matter how much it made him feel like his demons would catch up to him, too many curves in the road for him to out run his own shadow like he wanted to out run his thoughts. 

The soft crooning of Rush kept him company instead all the way until he shoved the car in park, until he nearly threw himself from the driver seat in the gravel lot just to get out. Just to feel the sun on his skin, dappled through the trees and leaf canopy diffused as it was and Dean pressed a hand to his mouth. Dean tipped back against the impala, leaned against the sun hot metal and slipped his arm until he could press his mouth to that tulip bloom just for something tangible. He wanted to sink his teeth there, wanted to pull at his love until it bled like the rest of him did, but he could never do that. 

Not to Sammy, never to Sam.

He locked the car though, pushed off of it and moved on quiet feet toward the lopsided building that boasted that it was the best bait shop in the tri county area. The porch creaked under foot, the screen door stuck a little bit in its frame, and Dean felt oversized within the space. Lined with too many fishing poles and smelling musty, smelling earthen and wet and grave dirt damp in a way that made him want to choke. He swallowed it down though, dealt with it like he did everything else and Dean ducked beneath a low hanging sign advertising nightcrawlers for three dollars a container.

There was a man at the counter there, visible now without the sign between them and Dean caught the narrow slit of the mans black eyes. He nodded a greeting, watched the way the man watched him and did his best not to slap his shoulder into a lure display. There was too much shit in here, too much stuff for a building that shouldn’t have felt so damn small and Dean bit the inside of his mouth against the frustration that scored through his insides. 

“You fish, boy?”

Thick mouthed words, worse still than Lorna had been and it took Dean a moment. He blinked stupid and slow and nodded only once he’d realised what the man had said, watched the way the other snorted. At least fifty, gray at the temples and wrinkled in the face, slightly gnarled hands that looked like they had seen too much work and Dean could sympathize even if he hated the man on principle. 

“I fly fish, sir, since I was ten years old.”

A grumble, a huff, and the man didn’t look any less hostile even with a counter between them. 

“Elisha. This’s my bait shop. You ain’t dressed t’fly fish.”

He had had to learn patience, had had to learn to be calm and to smile, to be just self deprecating enough and to shrug. Humility had never been his strong suit, he had never had that  _ aw shucks _ appeal to him, not like Sam had, not naturally at least. He had had to learn that, had had to press it into himself and had taken a charade of the characteristics that his brother had carried like breathing. 

It wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t ever enough, felt like a hollow blooded ghost of another, but he did what he needed to for the results that he wanted. 

So he shrugged now, so he looked down at himself with a bit of a chuckle at the sight of his own well worn jeans and a shirt that had been burgundy once, a long, long time ago. No, he wasn’t dressed to fish, hadn’t actually fished since he was twenty-one and they’d spent two weeks in big sky country Montana with nothing but endless blue above them and the sunshine making Sam sway like a flower in the breeze. 

“Came looking for my Dad actually. Tall man, scruffy, probably came through about a week ago? He’s set up a fishing camp somewhere around here, but I haven’t heard from him in a few days.”

He hadn’t thought it was possible, but the man’s face twisted up further, his slit eyes narrowed until Dean wasn’t even sure Elisha could see him where he stood. A slow chewing motion, the man smacking his lips together until Dean felt his own jaw tick in response. He nearly turned around then, nearly walked out just as haphazardly as he had walked in when Elisha cleared his throat and leaned forward. 

“Had a man come through few days back. Nice enough for a stranger, bought good amount a bait and went on his way.”

“Did you see what direction he went?”

It was like pulling teeth, and he had pulled teeth. He would rather have to pull a few of his teeth now, would rather have to drive with a dislocated shoulder or stitch himself back together than deal with this man. He shouldn’t have taken this case, he hated going anywhere considered  _ south _ with every fiber of his being, but he would never learn it seemed. 

“North east. Ain’t seen em since.”

“Thank you.”

Polite enough, kind enough, and he remembered to smile as he turned, setting course for the door with a want for the open sky and the quiet of his car. 

“Ay, boy, take a candy ‘for y’go.”

Looking back over his shoulder, Elisha tapped one gnarled knuckle at a pink plastic bowl that sat on the countertop. Little parchment paper wrapped pieces of candy, caramels by the looks of them, as wide as his thumb and piled into the bowl. Handmade, imperfect shapes and wrapping that didn’t quite line up in some places, Dean looked from the bowl to Elisha where he scowled. 

“My wife makes em. Marydelle makes the best candies in the tri county area.”

Evidently everything to do with this shop was the best in the tri county area, but he took a candy anyway. He took two just because of the way Elisha stared at him, the hostile set of his face, and he took both between his teeth at once just to get the old man to stop staring at him like that.

They tasted bitter, just the wrong side of burnt and too sweet, too sharp. He chewed them though, felt the caramel stick between his teeth and turn brown sugar liquid on his tongue. It took everything Dean had not to make a face, not to curl his lip or swallow them whole just to get the taste out of his mouth. 

Elisha smiled though, too many teeth and his cheeks split too wide, made Dean’s skin crawl even as the man nodded. 

“Have a good day, boy. Hope you find your Daddy soon.”

He only made a face once his back had turned, little pieces of parchment paper stuffed into his pocket. The sign seemed closer though, looked like it swayed a little when he ducked beneath it. He almost wanted to brace a hand on the shelf just to have something to hold, and the door jam felt slick beneath his hand. He wanted out, he needed out, he had gone wrong somewhere along the line. 

But his head felt cotton thick, underwater haze and exhaust smog heavy, and the sky was a bright, bright, swimming kind of blue that bled color everywhere. He felt like he was going vomit, could feel his heart pounding and his lungs throbbing. That was his car in the distance, that was his  _ home _ just out of reach. 

And that was the ground, rushing up to meet him as his vision went black around the edges and stuttering. 

Faces then, flashes of faces that he knew if only for having seen them today. Elisha with his narrow black eyes and his salt and pepper hair, the young couple that had been near the door, her red hair still in that frazzled tail and his brown curls unbrushed. The world moved, swam before him in pulses, the outside air, a hallway, flickering lights and dancing shadows. He knew them barely, if only just, but he felt the way they tried to twist his arms behind him, he knew the feeling of rope against his skin. 

But he knew  _ that _ face, the cut of that jaw and the half curl of that hair. Luminous, golden, fox sharp eyes and a wide mouth, there were hollows under those eyes, there was an underfed thin to those cheeks. Dripping rainwater down the upturn of his nose, clinging to his lashes, that hoodie had been pale blue, turned indigo and dark with the water of southern rain. 

Sam, his Sam, the last of his Sam he had seen an hour out of Baton Rouge where the rain blew sideways and the air was sticky hot. Eighteen and just that side of too thin, long limbed and wild eyed, he wanted to reach out, wanted to press his hands to Sam’s shoulders and pull him close as much as he wanted to tell him to run. Run fast and run far and never look back, do now what he had done all those years ago. But his hands wouldn’t work, and his mouth didn’t seem to work either, words muddled and thick. 

“S’m!”

His little brother’s eyes left his then, light of his love lost on him as Sam instead looked fearful at the people that surrounded them. 

Sam should never have to be scared. 

A scream on his tongue, rumbling guttural and rattling within his throat and Dean surged forward. He threw his weight toward the girl, caught her with his forehead to her nose and listened to the shrill cry she made. His foot went out then, catching her stomach where she had bent over and his hands hadn’t yet been bound for he took her head in his them when they fell, felt the floor with his knees even as he fisted his fingers in her hair. Harsh swings then, a quick series of punch like motions, and her hands clawed at his shoulders for all that he cracked her head across the floor. 

An arm hooked around his throat then, pulled him off of her suddenly still body with a choking hold. He screamed again as his vision swam, because that was Sam, his perfect,  _ breathing _ Sam with his back pressed into the corner and his golden eyes dripping gilded tears down his lashes, his cheeks. Sam with his wide mouth pressed thin and his slender fingers knotted in the too long sleeves of his jacket, looking like the whole world had tried to drown him. Looking scared and small with his pale features and his bleeding, golden eyes and Dean had never been able to stand to see his little brother cry. 

Dean reached back with claw curled fingers and found the jaw of whoever held him, the throbbing muscle of their throat. He grabbed there, knuckles grinding against bone and pulsing veins, and his feet kicked out into open air even as he squeezed tight, as he twisted. Instinctive, motions that he knew like he knew tying his shoes, like cleaning his guns or fixing his car, and the echoing  _ crack _ of a neck breaking was just as familiar. 

The body pulling him went slack, dead weight, and Dean nearly fell with it, and Sam was gone. 

He had kicked the housing for the hanging light, the liquid haze of his vision turning everything into a wild, swinging strobe as it spun. He had killed the younger two, her head caved in and his neck snapped and only Elisha remained, small now without the counter between the two of them for all that his black eyes remained slitted and furious. Teeth bared, Dean watched the old man where he stood, watched the two of him, the three of him that his spiraling vision had created. 

His mouth moved, words that Dean could see the formation of even if he couldn’t hear them. He could only hear the rushing of his own blood, could only hear the pulsing of his own heart and that, that was Sam. Soft, hiccuping sounds, muffled behind fingers and just barely audible from how he clenched his teeth, he had known that particular brand of Sam crying since his little brother was six and learned that he shouldn’t cry, that he couldn’t cry. 

Somewhere, probably pressed in a corner in an attempt to make himself small, curled as tight as he could to make himself harder to see, harder to hit, there was Sam. Crying, scared, wet Sam, and Dean wouldn’t leave him like that, couldn’t let that happen for all that he could hear those quiet, hiccuping sounds echoing in his head. He felt angry then, a ghost of a feeling that he hadn’t known for six years gone and he knew in the vague, dim sort of half aware that something was different, something had changed. 

He screamed all the same though, a punch of sound as Elisha stood there, as Elisha watched him. He launched himself forward before the old man could get away from him, cracked his knuckles across the age softened curve of the man’s jaw and felt the way that the black dog bite split back open. They tumbled like that, he had thrown his weight too far in with his punch, they hit the floor like that. Dean sprawled on top of him, Elisha brittle bone and loose skin from age and yet his fingers were sharp. He pulled at Dean, grappled at his shoulders and tried to push, but Dean had leverage, used it to his advantage. 

Blood smeared across Elisha’s face, streaks from his cheek to his temple and dean watched the way the strobing light made it flicker into something darker, something dead. Black eyes stared at him, slitted and thin and Dean watched the way they watered and rolled when his fingers locked around the wrinkled expanse of the old man’s throat. His breath smelled like blood, copper dirty and wet and Dean squeezed harder, pushed harder. 

A shuddering kick, a weak struggle, and Elisha went slack as the raging pulse beneath his fingertips went still and dead. 

That hiccuping, quiet crying was all he could hear apart from his own breathing then, and his arms trembled where he braced his weight on Elisha’s throat. His head came up then, a harsh panting to his chest, and there, that was Sam. Pressed into the corner near the door and looking ready to shake out of his skin, tracks of glimmering, sunshine metallic slicing down his cheeks and glittering drops falling from his lashes where they were too heavy to cling. His eyes were going to bleed out if he kept crying like that, they would be no color left if he didn’t stop, and a low, rumbling sound that was meant to be a comfort came from Dean’s throat as he pushed himself to his feet. 

“Shh, shh, i-it’s ‘kay Sammy.”

The gold dripping mirage of Sam just blinked at him though, soaked to the bone and looking ready to fall apart, he stared at Dean from beneath that too big hood with those eyes. Like Dean could fix it, like Dean could make it better, and his body ached at the sight. He tried to sway forward, footsteps uneven and his body humming with adrenaline as his heart patted out a furious symphony against the dug grave hollow of his ribs. 

A few steps was all he managed though, and Sam was gone with a flicker of the lights, corner empty like he’d ever been there to begin with. 

“Sam!”

His voice echoed around him, as loud as Dean suddenly was panicked and he whirled around. 

There, Sam was there, past the door and well into the dark yawn of the hall, Dean would recognize him anywhere with those bleeding eyes to match his bleeding heart. He stumbled forward then, anxiety in the way that he shook, but he followed Sam all the same, tumbled after him where his little brother and the only light he had ever needed. 

“Sam, c-cm’n, we ne’d t-Sam?”

His light went out again, momentarily swallowed by the dark and Dean would have cried had Sam not turned around again, had he not come back alive where Dean could see him, could find him. He stood further down the hall, stagnant in the mouth black hellmouth of another doorway, and he watched Dean for a minute before he turned his head. Before he gazed into the dark, and Dean saw the way he lifted one gold tipped, dripping hand, the way he pressed it over his mouth in the way Sam did when he felt sick. 

Hurried feet pulled him forward, but it seemed there was only so close he could get. By the time he reached the open doorway, his brother stood at the stairs further down. Curiosity though, morbid and undeniable and yet, he didn’t even need to turn his head. There was no denying the particular scent of rot that human bodies gave, cloying and thick and burning in his lungs, but Dean turned anyway. 

They hung there in the dark, just barely visible and silhouetted from a dim light within, rows upon rows of headless human bodies, suspended to the ceiling by butchers hooks that had been punctured through their spines. Blood covered the floor, too much of it for the drains to handle and he gagged, he was going to be sick and he braced a hand against the doorway as he heaved, as the breakfast he had eaten upended itself completely onto the floor. 

_ Ain’t ever gonna feed you somethin’ you won’t like, our stuffs all house made, meats all local, never had an unhappy customer. _

Cannibals, cannibals, it just had to be cannibals. 

They needed to get out of this town. 

“Sam!”

There was his light though, there was his love, crying still where he stood at the base of the stairs and watching Dean with those shimmering, dripping eyes. He nearly slipped in his haste to reach his brother, stumbled at the stairs and found Sam then at the top of them. He pushed himself up them though, barreled through the door that rested at the top and found himself on shaking legs in that God damn bait shop once more. 

There was no Sam in sight though, no Sam to be found and no sound of his crying, but there were splatters of gold on the floor, leading from the door and past the counter, to the sticky screen that Dean had first come in through. He followed them, ran a hand through his hair and pulled his nails across his skin. His keys in his pocket where he always kept them, there was no Sam in the fresh air lie of the outside, but there was his car, there was his home. Dean threw himself at it then, wrenched open the door after a moment of fumbling and that was safety there in the familiar leather of the cars interior, the nicotine smoke that still wafted about from where he had inhaled a cigarette before first stepping into the shop. 

Engine roaring to life, he threw the car in reverse and peeled out of the gravel lot, threw himself down the road he had come from and screamed past town. He took the interstate rather than a highway, a main road just to see other people even if the cars were few between at this time of day and Dean coasted just above seventy, impala stationed in the fast lane and his hands shaking. He was crying, could feel that he was in the hot wet of his face and the way his breathing felt off, but he was safe, and distance mattered more than anything else. 

He stopped seeing double around Louisville, Kentucky traffic kicking in a little in the city center before it petered out once more. 

It wasn’t until just past Evansville that he realized what direction he had pointed himself, what direction he had headed. He only gripped the wheel tighter though, sank a little in his seat and gave a glance to the empty side of the bench. No wet blue hoodie, no too long legs and no sunshine smile, there was no Sam, there hadn’t been a Sam in six years, he didn’t know why he thought there would be one now. 

Saint Louis, Columbia, Missouri was a miserable stretch of land with too many people and too many cars, and he made the split decision in Kansas City to go north toward Omaha rather than continue west. North toward Omaha, toward Sioux City, toward Sioux Falls, the one place he knew to be safe if only because it was familiar in a dim, daydream kind of way. 

Eighteen hours and two stops for gas, it was five miles out before he pulled off the road to hesitate, to breathe. Because Bobby was family, had said such when they were growing up and John would leave for days, weeks. Bobby was family in the way that John hadn’t always been, but six years changed things, surely. Six years had changed him, had altered everything he knew about his life and taken from him the only good thing he had tried to let go, what if six years had changed Bobby too?

He scrubbed both hands over his face though, exhaled past his palms and sat there for a moment in his silence. 

And then he got back on the road, and he drove the rest of the way to Bobby’s with something heavy in his chest. 

The scrapyard hadn’t changed much since the last time he’d been here. 

The sign had gotten a new coat of paint, the cars had rotated through like they always did because Bobby ran a respectable business even if it was a cover most often. There were plants on the porch though, there were plants in the yard, and Dean stared at them where he parked, stared at them still when he finally stretched himself out of his car and took in a breath of South Dakota air. 

Juniper bushes, still young enough that they sat in fat cast iron cauldrons on either side of the top of the porch steps. They spilled over with wiry branches and little frosted berries, well tended with a careful hand. Striped, lilac crocus grew by the dozen in the yard in little pockets, clusters of them that dotted the grass and even around the mailbox that looked like it had been painted a glossy, dark green within the past year. Pink carnations had been made into a bed on either side of the porch steps then, too many for him to count and swaying with soft color, delicate leaves and jointed stems and he swallowed thick, felt his eyes water. 

Protection. Abuse not. I will never forget you.

A shuddering breath and he pushed off from the car, only then recognized the blood on his hand and the leftover, cotton mouthed burn against the backs of his teeth from where he had panicked, where he had vomited. Dean rubbed his palms over the dirty thighs of his jeans though, didn’t let himself hesitate on the stairs. 

The porch didn’t creak anymore. 

He knocked on the door, a single, echoing rap that he felt sting through his knuckles. 

He didn’t wait long, heard the last heat rattle from the impala’s engine before the door pulled open, and that was Bobby, more grey than he had been but still just as familiar. Dean blinked at him, watched as Bobby blinked back, and he still knew that look of exasperation. 

“Aw hell boy.”

He curled in on himself a bit then, tired enough that he couldn’t help the way his shoulders rolled but Bobby gave him a smile. Bobby reached out and drew him in through the doorway without a single test, and Dean hesitated then instead where the elder man hadn’t. Bobby just shook his head though, gave a glance over his shoulder into the study before his attention came back. 

“You wouldn’t have made it on the property if you wasn’t you. C’mon Dean, lets...I ain’t seen you in six years son, ain’t been expecting you.”

Swallowing, working on a faint shrug, Dean felt the door shut behind him and he stood there in the entryway between the outside world and the man who was family. As he watched, Bobby scrubbed a hand over his face, looked a little haggard then for all that he looked healthy, looked nearly nervous. He could hear the sigh the older man gave, heavy and long and Dean’s throat clicked. 

“Had trouble in the Appalachians. I just...needed somewhere to go.” He floundered then, felt a flare of panic then, and he was so tired for all that he pulled himself straighter. “I can go, if you want me to Bo-”

“Now y’just shut your fool mouth, I ain’t ever kicked you out before, not bout t’start now. There’s just some things that, well. It’s...it’s probably better if I show you. Just be quiet, yeah? Only just got to sleep a little while ago.”

Brow furrowing, his question was lost to empty air as Bobby turned, as the elder hunter left him in the entryway. He went to the study then, away from the stairs and down past the living room like he knew Dean would follow. His boots made quiet sounds on the wooden floors and Bobby stopped in the wide archway, angled his head into the room. He’d been in the study dozens of times though, had spent summers sorting through books heavier than his duffle and older than his father, he didn’t expect much else had changed. 

But his vision swam then, turned wet and swimming while his breath caught in his throat. He could feel his heartbeat in his fingertips then, something that felt a lot like suffocation in his lungs. He braced himself on the wall then even as he stared, because he knew those shoulders just like he knew those cheeks, that jaw. 

His hair was a little longer than it had been all those years ago, held a little more curl to it. The upturned arch of his nose, the curl of his lashes, he looked like he had finally grown into his legs, his hands. Thin fingers, thin wrists, pulled taunt and hollow boned like he didn’t eat enough, like he didn’t sleep enough, but Dean slapped a hand over his mouth to muffle the sob of his breath. Because even half pressed into Bobby’s oversized desk and hidden by a sleeve, Dean knew that face, would know that face anywhere, Sam looked awfully well for someone who had burned alive three years prior. 

He was crying then for the second time that day, fat, hot tears on his face and heaving sobs to his breath for all that he tried to muffle himself. Dimly, he felt Bobby put a hand on his shoulder but he shook so hard that he nearly knocked the touch off completely. It felt a lot like his heart was going to come out of his chest, but he didn’t think he had felt like this since Sam walked away an hour out of Baton Rouge, since the apologetic police officer in Palo Alto had informed him that his brother had been pronounced dead. He was too old for this shit, too old to feel like this, to cry like this but Dean felt himself falling apart there in a house he hadn’t stood in in six years over a beautiful, stupid, impossible boy he hadn’t seen in just as long. 

“Sammy?”


	2. Alyssum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unedited so be prepared for typos, literally just finished this, length is a little shorter than the previous chapter? It felt done though, so I'm giving it to you now. That said, updates are just going to sort of be whenever? So thank you to those who stick around!

Funny, how everything went quiet then, like the whole world had gone silent, like every living thing held its breath along with him. He could feel the  _ thump thump thump _ of his heart in his chest, the pounding of his blood where it rushed through his veins, but everything was quiet, gospel whispered and sanctuary hushed. He’d never understood that before, had never know what people meant when they said everything stopped. The whole world had caught fire in his mind's eye when he had found that missed voicemail, his insides ablaze and bottomless when he had learned that Sam had died, every last shred of him up in flames and screaming with Sammy dead and gone and forever out of reach, except-

He could see Bobby talking out of the side of his vision, mouth moving slow. He had a beard now, hadn’t shaved in days, weeks, months, nothing past a cursory trim, more facial hair than Dean had ever seen Bobby have. He had a few more wrinkles now, age had softened his bones a bit and lined his face, and his hair had thinned some on the top for all that it had lost its color a bit on the sides. Bobby didn’t seem quite as tall now as he had been back then, but maybe it was Dean who had gotten taller, but maybe it was both of them who had gotten older. 

He felt older.

It was strange, the things he noticed when his world turned to a stop like that, when his heart beat a slow, broken rhythm within his chest and his vision swam. He swayed between leaning a little heavier on the door frame and stumbling into the familiar, sunlit warm of Bobby’s study. Because for all that the quiet coffin of his heart had gone empty and cold from disuse, his heart was there, just across a room some twenty feet wide and bathed in the soft color of the midday sun. That was his heart there, with hair that had grown a little long and with faint shadows to his cheeks like Sam still didn’t quite eat enough. He looked like an innocence that Dean no longer believed in or knew, the faint color of freckles on his skin and the sight of him breathing images from memories long dead and time whitewashed. 

He felt twenty again for a moment, unwounded by the world around him and warm to the core. Nothing more than a day spent with Uncle Bobby, John off somewhere in the east and the house a little hot in the summer heat. If he let himself go enough, Sam was sixteen, not quite sure what to do with his growing limbs and prone to over exerting himself as his body tried to establish its limits, loose limbed and soft faced where he had fallen asleep at Bobby’s desk again. 

But Sam’s legs were too long, and his own bones were too heavy and tired, too much had changed for this to be a simple dream. He wasn’t that man anymore, didn’t have it in him to smile like he had then or to laugh like that, and he was scared that the Sam before him would flicker out of being just like the dripping, hollow eyed Sam back in Cripple Creek had. He wasn’t wet this time, the soft, faded grey of whatever shirt he wore far from the fabric soaked hang of that hoodie, and Dean couldn’t see much of his face but there was no gold upon his cheeks, his lashes. No slip of color where it had bled from his eyes with all of his crying, this Sam didn’t look like he had cried at all recently, soft hair and a healthy color to his skin. 

This Sam was alive though, this Sam was breathing, Dean could hear the faint rasp of it from where he had pressed his face a little too hard into the desk, the quiet rattle of it. His legs felt weak and he blinked burning, wet eyes and choked quietly when Sam didn’t flicker out, Sam didn’t leave. He didn’t stop breathing either, curled over and pillowed by his own arms on the familiar still of Bobby’s desk and Dean pressed a hand to his mouth to muffle the wounded, quiet sounds he could feel himself making. For those were tears upon his cheeks, he himself cried for all that this Sam didn’t, silent heaves of his chest as he stuffed the palm of his hand against his teeth. He could feel Bobby move then, felt the way that the elder hunter tried to steady him and Dean felt weak, felt dizzy and drugged once more and feared then in that instant that he hadn’t left Cripple Creek, that Elisha and his blood stained gums still had him in the basement of that bait shop. 

Because Sam was beauty, timeless with the seamless reverence of any classical portrait he had ever seen, for Sam was all sharp lines and soft hair, only a peek of his face visible and the curl of some of his lashes turned burnish in the light of the sun. For it streamed through the window of the study, through the lace curtains that Karen had put up when she still lived that Bobby had never had the heart to take down for more than just a gentle cleaning and the spill of sunlight cast soft cutouts of light across both Sam and the desk, and his little brother had fallen asleep there. Curled in the warmth of it like it was all he needed, gold tinged hair and burnish lashes, books around him and the earthen after scent of coffee a few hours past in the air, Sam was domestic, Sam was safe. 

A fat pot sat on the corner of the desk, creamy white and detailed in its structure with arching scallops inlaid into its sides, Bobby wasn’t one for flowers. All the same, little blue forget-me-nots sprouted from the dirt within it, finger pressed and loosely packed and their color was bright. Well cared for, well loved, little yellow crowns at their centers and sturdy stems and Dean caught the way that the blooms seemed to lean toward his brother. Perhaps their blossoms had simply started to turn into the sun, but even the stems had swayed appropriately and he didn’t know if forget-me-nots were sun seeking or not and he didn’t know who to ask. Their soft petals and little crowns had turned slightly though, angled toward Sam where he slept in the soft lit glow of the sun and there was a bubble of almost hysterical laughter in his throat that he swallowed down frantically. 

_ True love _ .

He tried to move forward then, wanted to touch, wanted to pull Sam to his feet and crawl inside his ribs and never let go. Keep Sam close, keep him safe, because Sam was more physical and real than Dean had known him to be for six years and he felt like he was going to break into a thousand pieces. 

Bobby gripped his shoulder then, fingers firm and his hold tight, pulled him to a stop before he could even move. 

“Dean, y’need to listen t-”

“ _ Bobby, please _ .”

The hunters hold only tightened on him though, and Bobby took it further still by moving, by placing himself half in front of Dean. By obscuring most of Sam where he slept, soft and sunlit and Dean leaned aside in turn, desperate. A hand on his face then, pulling his head until he looked at Bobby, until he gave the other man his attention even though it hurt.

“Dean, you need to listen to me now, okay? I get it, that’s your brother in there, but there’s a lot of things you need to know before you just go stomping in there. You listenin’ to me?”

_ He couldn't see Sam. _

Dean nodded though, fingers curling into fists, he felt like he was going to shake apart, hadn’t yet stopped his crying.

“I need you to try not to scare him.”

“Bobby-”

“You see those scars, son?”

Bobby let him lean then, let him look, and for all that he had been distracted by the sheer presence of  _ Sam _ , he could see them now. Jagged, thin lines where something looked like it had dug in deep, looped around his wrists in two bands each before they coiled up his arms, disappeared beneath the sleeves of his shirt. Silvery against the sun kiss of the rest of his skin, there were teeth there, pulls from where something else had bit down alongside, and he felt a little sick because he knew the patterns there, knew those sort of scars. 

Someone had wrapped his little brother up in barbed wire, bound him tight with a sadistic kind of cut and Dean  _ knew _ the way that barbed wire burned, the way it sliced through skin and clung for all its worth. Someone had contained his brother in that, had held Sam down with it like he was some kind of animal. Old scars, they looked long since healed, but he wondered at the severity of them, just how far they spread past Sam’s arms. Because he couldn’t see much else, he couldn’t even see Sam’s face really and Dean felt a cold, tight clench around his heart where it had only just started to beat again. 

For all that Sam was alive, Dean couldn’t help but wonder just what he had lived through. 

“Who.”

His voice sounded hollow to his own ears for as wet as his face was, hushed as he was. Bobby heard him perfectly all the same, pressed as close as they were and Dean watched the way his jaw clenched, the way the older man stared at him. 

“C’mon.”

“Bobb-”

“Boy ain’t goin’ nowhere, Dean. Hasn’t left in three years, he ain’t gonna up and leave now.”

Bobby took him by the arm then, pulled him where shock had made Dean turn loose and slack and he stumbled with a faint step. Another look toward Sam, Sam where he slept in the sunlight, Sam with his sun kissed skin and his scars before they were around the corner, before he was pulled down the hall. It hurt, a tight pull in his chest and a hammering of his heart in his ribs because Sam was  _ right there _ and suddenly he couldn’t see him all over again. 

Three years, Sam had been here three years. 

Sam had been alive for three years, had never died, had done  _ something _ that Dean didn’t understand, but he hadn’t seen his little brother breathing in anything other than a dream haze memory for six years. He had thought himself alone since Sam walked out that door into the wet Louisiana night, left alone with an obsessive drunk for a father and a lifestyle that would get him killed before he hit thirty, he had etched his love and the memory of Sam’s laugh into his skin in a desperate bid to not give into the depressive gnawing of his loneliness. But Sam had never died, Sam had never been far and had never left for all that Sam had left  _ him _ .

Bobby took him to the kitchen, far enough that older man seemed comfortable talking above a whisper. He edged Dean toward a chair, left him standing there beside the table to put on a fresh pot of coffee instead. An old hershey tin sat on the sill, faded paint and the cap missing, insides instead no doubt filled with dirt from the way that the lip overflowed with a mint plant that seemed intent to do its best to spill over the edges. Virtue, of all the plants for Bobby to stare at every time he made coffee, and Dean would have laughed had he been able to catch his breath enough. 

Instead his hands made fists, pulsing, tight curls as he tried to calm himself, as he tried to keep from crying again, from shaking apart. There was a bitter set of emotion in the back of his throat, a sharp, near-metallic burn that he knew to be jealousy, that he knew to be contempt and Dean swallowed against it and the knot it had tried to make. Bobby had had Sam for three years, Bobby had had Sam living and breathing, had had him talking and laughing for three years, and nobody had called Dean, nobody had reached out and told him. 

Except, he knew better, nobody had been able to call him, nobody had been able to reach out. 

He had closed ranks in on himself after Palo Alto, had wrapped himself up in his hate and his solidarity and his survival after California, after John. New numbers to replace the one he had lost and found too late, new identities to shed the skins that had failed to guard him well enough, new ink to his skin and the curl of nicotine in his lungs just to have something to stave off the panic he could always feel rising, Dean himself had died along with Sam, a new man for all that he didn’t feel like breathing, didn’t feel like being. Hollow bones and grave dug empty insides, his heart had gone cold and dead for all that he had pressed flowers into his skin for a brother that would never laugh at them, a love that would never see them. 

But Sam wasn’t dead, and what did he do with himself without that foundation upon which he had rebuilt himself?

“Why didn’t you find me?”

He sounded small then, sad and tired and scared like he hadn’t voiced in over ten years, in over twenty. He sounded small to his own ears, voice wet and crackling and he saw the way that Bobby nearly flinched at the sound. The older man braced a hand on the counter instead, leaned into it and scrubbed a hand across his face, his eyes. The silence hung like that for a moment, long enough that Dean wanted to turn, wanted to edge back into the study where they had come from and fall to his knees next to the sun laced mirage of his little brother. 

“He told me not to.”

That stung, felt like a blow then to the tender just behind his ribs where it had started to unfurl and Dean turned his head. 

“You need to understand that he was a mess when he showed up. More blood on him than skin, I ain’t sure how he even drove here. I could barely get him to stop crying, and when I said I should call you?” Dean watched from the corner of his eye as Bobby stared out the window then, as his fingers curled around the lip of the counter and he leaned his weight a little harder. Talking didn’t help, he suddenly wished they hadn’t even started, it would be better to just sit at Sam’s feet and soak in his sunlight, would have been better to just take Sam and run. But he didn’t know what they were running from, and Sam had already run from him, like he wasn’t safe enough, like he wasn’t strong enough. “Whole damn house shook Dean, and I ain’t exaggerating. Poor boy was sobbing and I thought the house was going to come down round us, and he told me not to call you.”

“You could ha-”

“He  _ told _ me not to, Dean. I ain’t been able to get your name off my tongue in the three years he’s been here, not since you showed up just now on my doorstep. I love that boy, love you both, and I don’t know if its what happened to him or if he’s always been like this. Maybe that’s why John was such a bastard with him.”

Thick tongued and sour stomached, Dean rocked in place, stared at Bobby then for all that the man shook his head and pulled a coffee tin down from the cabinet to start a new pot. Because he knew that feeling on the back of his neck, knew the want to protect and to bare his teeth for all that he hadn’t felt it like this in years. Bobby would never threaten them, would never threaten Sam, had never been anything but loving if a little heavy handed at times they deserved it but every single instinct that had long since gone dormant had come back online full force and Dean felt like  _ he _ was going to shake apart for all that he stood still. 

“What are you saying?”

A heavy sigh, and Bobby turned to watch him then while to coffee pot started to drip. There was something quiet in his eyes, something tired and old and Dean felt young in the wake of his stare. He felt young like he hadn’t in years, and if he held his breath long enough, dizzied his vision enough, this was just another scolding from where he and Sam had climbed the salvage piles again rather than somewhere that he suddenly didn’t want to be. 

“Sam ain’t human, at least, not completely. John never talked much about him, not what mattered, but I know he knew something. Told me I needed to kill him if it ever turned out that the two of you couldn’t.”

His legs felt weak, and there was a chair beside him. Dean sank down into it with a numb set in his bones, he couldn’t feel his feet, he couldn’t feel his knees. Bobby looked taller then, and the man watched him with that quiet sympathy still and Dean swallowed thick and slow. 

“No, no, he wouldn’t-”

But he  _ would _ , Dean knew that, knew it in the way that John had gotten that look in his eyes when he’d drank too much, the malicious curl his voice would take. He had always looked at Sam like that, just a touch too dark and a bit too mean and Dean had never trusted to leave the two of them alone, not since he was five years old and Mom was gone and he knew better by sheer instinct alone. 

Take care of Sammy had always meant everything, even if it had meant keeping Sam safe from John.

Curling over here he sat, both hands pressed to his face, Dean sucked in a slow breath. His chest hurt, his head hurt, and his breathing was more shallow than he had thought it would be. He had seen the way John had looked at his little brother, remembered the way that their father had drank and yelled and hit every time Sam talked about school, about wanting friends or wanting to stay after hours for a club, for a field trip, for anything not related to the tight, suffocating schedule of training that John always gave them. He remembered the bruises, the way Sam would flinch sometimes when even Dean reached out for him, the way that Dean himself had done his absolute best to redirect John and his anger onto something else, even if that something was his own skin. 

Better him than Sam, but that-there was a weight on his chest, there was a breathless heavy in his head and he could hear Bobby talking in a muffled, underwater haze. Bleary eyed, his hands were pulled from his face, and the older hunter had crouched down next to him. His mouth moved, words that Dean couldn’t hear, couldn’t hear anything past the thunder of his heart because he couldn’t catch his breath. Bobby’s hands on his face, but his skin felt hot like Dean himself was frozen, like he had turned to ice to match the dead, quiet cold of his heart. Burning in his eyes, a burning in his chest, he could see Bobby for all that his image swam.

Something pressed against his wrist where his arms had gone slack against his sides. 

His head couldn’t turn far, not with how Bobby cupped his jaw, but there was something out of the corner of his vision there, creeping in and looking up at him, and-

A greyhound blinked back at him, large brown eyes and a thin face. It looked concerned, with its ears tucked back like that and its nose smearing wet imprints across the tulip on his inner arm, dark nose pressed to the pound of his pulse. Dark red fur so short it stood on end behind the dogs ears, and he stared at it as much as the dog stared at him. Long legs and a whip-like tail, a wide ribcage, it was the strangest looking dog he had seen in person, but it was a dog all the same.

“Why do you have a dog?”

His words were hoarse, but that was his voice all the same, brittle and wet and aching. The dogs tail wagged, thin and fast enough that half its body tried to follow the motion and it nudged at his wrist until his arm went up, until his hand rested on the top of its head. 

“Her names Rosie, she’s Sam’s therapy dog. You were having a panic attack, you back with me now?” 

Bobby’s touch was gentle for all that his hands were rough, and Dean noticed then that it was just the single one that held his face. The other had taken his left hand by the wrist, had pressed his palm flat against the wide of Bobby’s ribs, their breathing synced for as exaggerated as it was. Like Bobby had done this before, like Bobby knew this like it was routine and Dean blinked at him, slow and stupid before he nodded. 

Bobby nodded, a reassuring smile on his face and a gentle soft to his voice, his knees were going to ache if he stayed down like that much longer. 

“Good, good, just keep breathin’ with me Dean, c’mon. Big and deep, there we go.”

It helped, as much as it made him feel childish and small, helped to feel Bobby’s heart under his palm and helped to match his breathing to the over exaggerated inhales that the other man took. Slowly, his head stopped spinning quite so fast, his heart stopped racing at such a frantic beat and Dean’s mouth trembled with every inhale and exhale. He wanted to cry again, he had just stopped but there was a burn there, he had cried more in the last two days than he had in years, hadn’t even realized he had anything left in him to cry. 

The hand on Rosie’s head curled, shaking fingers petting at the top of her head and he looked away from Bobby to find her instead. Her head on his lap, her whip cord tail wagging still, she blinked liquid large eyes at him and pressed her face a little harder against his leg the more he pet her. 

“Don’t think you need any coffee after that.”

He couldn’t find his voice to argue then, Bobby sounded more fond and exasperated all at once than anybody had for a long time. A crack of his knees when he stood and blunt fingers ruffled through his hair as the older man walked back toward the sink, the fridge. Dean just stared at Rosie though, careful fingers on her delicate boned face and against her soft, warm fur. She sighed, a full, heavy sound, and he watched as her ears twitched a little, his fingertips a nervous sort of gentle where he touched her. 

He didn’t think he’d ever pet a dog before. 

Rosie didn’t seem to mind, her long tail swaying slowly and her wide, liquid eyes intent on his face. Dean couldn’t help himself then, felt himself smile for all that his face was sticky and his eyes still burned. He sniffed and she blinked at him, her dark nose curling in a little mimicry of his own and Dean felt a watery, crackling laugh where it trembled in his chest. 

A glass thumped on the table in front of him, tall with dark green tinted glass.

“Drink, gonna throw together somethin’ to eat, look like you ain’t even slept.”

Barely a glance and he reached for it, wrapped a single hand around the cup and pulled it to his mouth, fingers of his free hand still tracing delicate patterns over Rosie’s head. The first drink down his throat, it wasn’t until the second hit his tongue that Dean paused, brow furrowing as he finally, finally looked at the cup. Sure enough, past the dark green glass and the faint frost, that was chocolate milk, sweet and creamy on his tongue and sticky against his teeth. He swallowed his mouthful, lips smacking together while he voiced his confusion. 

“Bobby, why do you have chocolate milk?”

“Sam likes it.”

Sam liked it, something Dean hadn’t known, something Dean had never had the chance to even learn. They hadn’t had the money for things like chocolate milk, had rarely had the money for milk in general, he had never known his brother to have a sweet tooth. Vegetables and chicken and salads, Sam had always been careful about the things he ate when they could afford diners, but he had never known his brother to have anything sweeter than an apple between his teeth. 

What else did Sam like that he didn’t know?

Bobby said it like it was common sense though, like he was something he had known for years. 

A quiet sound, and Dean stared down into his glass, took another sip of the sugary sweet chocolate. Rosie turned though, head lifted from his thigh and her body half poised to move, but Dean didn’t have a chance to follow her gaze or her long legs as she moved back toward the door. 

“C’mon son, you can’t hide out in the hall forever. Nobody’s gonna hurt you in your own home.”

Bobby’s back was turned, but he spoke like the situation was familiar, and Dean heard the floorboards creak behind him. 

Glass on the table, his breath caught in his chest and he turned then, heart a war drum hammer in his chest. He stumbled a little, one foot caught on the table leg where he pulled himself to his feet and fuck, but he was going to cry all over again. 

Sam’s eyes were still golden, trapped sunlight that stared at Dean from a pale, tear streaked face. 

He didn’t know why he had thought that would change, Sam had always been sunlight from the very first time Dean ever saw him, summer personified in the way that he had smiled and everything had been right in Dean’s little world. Someone else had thought so too, not every mark that dripped down his face was a tear stain. Someone had tried to take his eye, a slash in the soft hollow underneath only to cut wide, to rip down Sam’s cheek like a tear. The scar had turned silvery against the rest of his skin, against the ruddy sun blessed color of him, it matched the barbed wire scars that Dean could see on his arms. 

It matched the barbed wire scars that Dean could see on his throat. 

Someone had hurt his baby, but it was him that Sam watched with those fox sharp eyes blown wide, him that Sam watched with his full, wide lips pressed thin. Dean could see where he had started to chew on his cheek, he still did that, hadn’t managed to kick the habit even in false death and that was his heart throbbing, that was his chest heaving. He had inked his skin in the memory of Sam’s laugh, of Sam’s smile, and Dean wondered what his little brother saw when he looked at him now, because Sam didn’t look like he laughed much anymore, didn’t look like he smiled very often now. 

He was taller, broader, and Dean wanted to reach for him, wanted to gather him close, an aborted motion with his hands half raised because Sam had that look to him still. Shadows in his eyes and something just a little too wide had taken root there, something blossomed nearly wild in the pull of his skin and Dean remembered all too well the way Sam had flinched when John had raised his voice, seventeen and desperate and angry. He didn’t want to scare him now, didn’t want to scare him ever again. 

“H-hey Sammy.”

His voice broke then, wet and mangled and wounded, and he wondered if he looked like Sam did then. Pulled thin and aching, Sam looked like he wanted to run, but Dean couldn’t tell where, if the destination was toward him or as far as he could get. It was probably safest to run away, part of him wanted to tell Sam to run as far and as fast as he could, wanted to tell him to save himself before the poison that coursed through Dean’s veins made good on its promise and took Sam too. He was selfish though, as selfish at the sight of his brother now as he had been lonely without those fox sharp, golden eyes watching him. 

Rosie leaned heavy against his brothers leg, her head pressed into his thigh and her face upturned. Her dark nose nudged at his hand but Sam didn’t seem to notice, his gaze locked on Dean. Dean and the blood he could still feel in his hair, with his bruised eyes and his shaking hands, he must have looked half dead himself. 

He could see Sam breathing, could see the rise and fall of his chest and the way that his throat moved when he swallowed, Sam was more real here standing in front of him than he had been in six years. 

He didn’t move though, Dean barely breathed, and instead he watched as Sam watched him, as Rosie leaned heavy against his brothers leg like she needed to support him. Like Sam needed her like he used to need Dean, and that hurt, hurt like seeing his sun tanned brother bound in silvery scars hurt, the bittersweet, consuming ache from knowing that he wasn’t alone. Sam stood there though, like he wasn’t sure, like he didn’t know, and Dean wanted to make the decision for him, wanted to leave just so Sam stopped looking at him like that. 

Sam had called him and he hadn’t come, he could still remember the way his little brother’s voice had sounded in that recovered voicemail, a year too late and too many states between them. The way he had sobbed out Dean’s name, the fear, the quiet admittance that something wasn’t right. His classmates had gone missing and strange things had happened, and Sam had called him only for Dean not to come when Sam needed him most. 

Did Sam hold that against him like Dean did?

No, it didn’t seem like he did, because Sam pitched forward then, over six feet of a little brother who wasn’t quite so little anymore crashed into him with enough force that the air gusted from his lungs. Breathless, they clattered together so hard that their combined weight shoved Bobby’s table a little ways across the kitchen with a squealing sound of the table legs against the floor, but Dean held tight. Arms coiled around Sam’s waist, Sam’s own clung to his shoulders and he could feel the way that his brother’s legs seemed to give, the way that Sam’s face pressed into the warm of his throat. 

Sam sobbed against his pulse with one hand clasped against the rosebud that hid at the back of his neck but Dean didn’t mind, Dean didn’t care, his own hot, gasping breaths and fast falling tears pressed against Sam’s hair. 

They held onto each other like they would never get another chance, their reunion loud in the otherwise domestic quiet of Bobby’s kitchen. One of his hands threaded through Sam’s hair, still too long and softer than it had right to be and Dean’s tears were as hot as they were angry, bitter and desperate and scared all at once. He held onto Sam with everything that he had, felt his brother sob into his throat and shake against him like he would tremble into pieces if Dean didn’t hold onto him tight enough. 

It was only then that Dean realized he spoke, a muffled, wavering repetition of Sam’s name that he pressed into his brothers hair. He didn’t want to ever let go, would never let Sam stray far, but he tried to adjust his grip, tried to tighten how he held his brother to pull Sam closer against him. But Sam had gone deadweight heavy against him, arms stronger than Dean remembered tight to his shoulders and the back of his throat. He couldn’t hold both of them, too tired and too overwhelmed, and he heard Bobby give a shout from behind them as the table skated a little further across the floor while they crashed to the ground. 

Sam nearly in his lap, pulled so close that Dean could feel the way his little brother’s heart pounded in his chest, Dean felt his own back crack from how tight they had wound around one another. Sam seemed just as intent as him to get as close as he could, and everything about Sam smelled like sunshine and roses, the same scent that had filled Dean’s every dreaming moment for the last six years. 

If he pressed kisses to his brother’s hair, well, surely Sam wouldn’t blame him, not with how Dean could feel his panting mouth pressed to the throb of his thunderous pulse. 

“I’m so sorry Sammy, I’m so fuckin’ sorry. I’m so sorry, I’m here now.” 

Muffled words, quiet with a wet crackle where he had caught his breath enough to do something other than sob. Dean made no move to loosen his hold though, white knuckled and straining for all that Sam’s hands had fisted in the back of his shirt. His little brother still cried though, hiccuping sounds that Dean tried to sooth with a hand skating up and down Sam’s spine, Sam pulled at him like he wanted to plant himself inside Dean’s bones, and there was an appeal there, Dean would never tell him no if Sam managed to figure out how. 

Time passed like that, the brothers wound tight around one another on the smooth, cool wood of Bobby’s kitchen floor. Sam’s grip didn’t loosen for the longest time, not even after Dean had caught his breath and murmured soothing nonsense against the others hair. Silent against him but Sam still shook with a fine boned tremble, the kind of shivers that had taken over his entire body and Dean refused to let go. Twenty-eight going on twelve, he wouldn’t be moved from where he had fallen because Sam needed him, Sam needed him like Sam hadn’t had him in too many years and Dean would never leave him again. 

They would have to kill him and torch his bones to get him to move on while Sam still breathed. 

“I’ll never leave you again.”

Sam’s grip tightened further still, Dean could feel his nails where they scraped through the thin cotton of his shirt like Sam needed to cling just to make sure he kept his word.

“Promise. I ain’t gonna leave you ever again.” 

It took some movement on his part, Sam was stronger than he remembered, Sam clung to him so tight that Dean was half worried his shirt would rip under the pressure. He got his hands on Sam’s face though, careful on his jaw and his sun hot skin and Dean leaned the two of them apart enough that he could see his little brother’s face. Sam’s sharp eyes were bloodshot, red rimmed, fox gold and sunshine shimmer, but none of the color had run down his face, none of it had dripped from his eyes until they were empty and white like they’d been in Cripple Creek. Sam watched him with a light cast somewhere between relief and panic and Dean did his best to smile even as his insides knotted on themselves further. 

“You’re gonna get sick of me. I ain’t gonna hunt, I ain’t gonna leave, you wanna stay here then we’re gonna stay here, Sammy.”

Wide eyes, bright eyes, Sam watched him with a tremble to his gaping mouth and Dean pressed their foreheads together. A substitute for how he wanted to smear their mouths together, but Sam didn’t need that so Dean would go without. It was enough to hold his brother, it was enough to have his love in his arms and lifesblood hot beneath his hands, more than he had thought he would ever have again. He had nothing else to give other than himself, world weary and beaten down, but Dean suddenly had everything to lose and he hoped he was enough this time. 

Sam’s eyes on him, he’d forgotten how heady it was to be at the center of Sam’s attention, the rush that it sent through his blood to be the only thing Sam looked at. Sam hadn’t said a single word to him, and Dean didn’t know everything he’d been through but those golden eyes were still razor sharp. A relief in his chest, on his breath, because he could still see the fire bright intelligence in those eyes that he had known when they were younger, Sam hadn’t lost himself for as much as someone had tried to break him. 

Those eyes cut to his arm though, and Dean watched as Sam took his wrist in one hand. Long fingers, knuckles with scars that he remembered and nails kept compulsively short, he went easy where Sam pulled him. It wasn’t until Sam held his hand wrist up that Dean realized what he had seen, what Sam had found there on his skin, and Dean could feel his heart pounding even as he let Sam pull and move and turn him like he wanted. 

A thumb swept up along the tulip’s stem, traced it along his vein and he watched as Sam smeared his thumb across the full bloom. 

When he looked up though, Sam stared at him with something cracked open and fathomless in his expression, pressed his thumb a little harder against the tulip’s petals until Dean hoped it bruised. Because Sam knew what that meant, Sam knew what every flower inked into his skin would mean if only he saw them and Dean wanted it to bruise, wanted the tulip to turn abused and dark so it went red, so it spoke of his love before fading into the yellow that he had intended it to be. Yellow ink faded too fast but Sam would understand, Sam would know. 

Sam seemed to already know, watching him with those fathomless eyes and his thumb across a petal and Dean swallowed against the tight knot in his throat. 

“Yeah, Sammy.”

He watched as Sam’s pupils blew wide, swimming pools of black against the summer sun gold that Dean had missed so fucking much. Still, Sam didn’t say anything, didn’t speak a single word to him for all that he stared, and Dean wished he would, wanted to know what went through that wicked sharp mind. But Sam didn’t seem like he planned on saying anything, and Dean would never push him for anything more than Sam wanted to give. 

Bobby cleared his throat behind them, a little bit fond and a little bit exaggerated and Dean only turned to look at him once Sam had. Beside the table where it had been shoved across the floor, Bobby stood with one hand braced on the back of a chair. There was a smile on his face though, something soft there and Dean felt like a child, was fairly certain he had been sprawled out on this kitchen floor more than once in his life for various reasons. 

“Y’all ain’t eaten on my floor.”

Sam hadn’t let go of his hand, still held him by the wrist and pulled Dean to his feed when Sam himself stood. Sure enough, Sam was taller, had at least three inches on him and looked just as startled by that as Dean was. Dean had always assumed he would be larger than life, a universe barely contained, it was good to see that Sam’s bones had agreed with him, height to match his long arms, his long legs. 

There was a hesitant pull to Sam’s smile then, a little shy and a little scared but Dean smiled back, let Sam have his hand if that was what he wanted. He wouldn’t tell Sam no, not whether Sam wanted to hold his hand or if Sam wanted to steal food from his plate like he used to when he was five. With the two of them standing, Bobby made quick work of shoving the table back and Sam let go of his hand just to nudge Dean toward a chair instead. But Sam set right next to him, chair pulled so close that their knees cracked together and Dean let him, took it a step further by hooking one of their legs together so that their thighs pressed close. 

Two glasses of chocolate milk, two plates with what looked like leftover pancakes from that morning and Dean watched as Sam carefully cut out a piece from his. It was full of chocolate chips, made sticky and hot by the microwave and Dean could only assume his own were the same. 

“So, you’re staying with us?”

Bobby sat across from them, a cup of coffee in his hands to make up for the lack of a plate, and he watched Dean over the lip of it. Beside him, Dean heard Sam pause, felt the way his leg tensed and he dropped a hand to find his brother’s knee. Instead, Sam laced their fingers together, caught his hand and lifted it so it was held hostage in his lap, as if Dean would mind. Sam held tight to him though, white knuckled and fierce like he wouldn’t give Dean an option, and he wondered if his brother was going to say anything at all. 

Sam watched him from beneath dark, curling lashes, with golden fox sharp eyes and that scar on his cheek, those scars on his throat and he was just as beautiful as he had been when he was eighteen and angry in the Louisiana night. 

“Yeah. I’m staying.”

Sam grinned at him, a smear of chocolate on his mouth and something swimming in his bright eyes, and Dean wanted to kiss him so bad his heart felt like it would thunder out of his chest but he smiled back instead and held on just as tight. 


	3. Milkvetch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do claim somewhere that I'm slow at updates? Sorry for the wait, enjoy!

Sunshine splendor and bated breath, Sam still hadn’t let go of his hand.

His fingers had gone numb, the tips of Sam’s own kissed pressure white marks into the spaces between his knuckles, and Dean hoped they bruised. He wanted to carry Sam with him, wanted marks of Sam on his skin for all that he himself hadn’t yet let go. For Sam was as precious as he was priceless and Dean refused to lose him again even if he had to bind them together.

He wanted to trace his mouth across Sam’s own, across his scars, but he would hold his hand if that was what his brother wanted.

He would hold his hand until they torched their bones if that was what Sam needed.

He had already inked the memory of Sam’s smile and the echo of his laughter into his skin, surely then the next step would be to carve Sam into his ribs, would be to press as close as he could until their breathing was shared and those fox sharp eyes were all he could see. Surely, surely, surely Sam wouldn’t mind, not with how he clung, not with how Dean could feel his little brother tense every time he shifted, as if he were going to pull away. As if he would leave, as if he could, but Dean had promised he wouldn’t, had sworn with his breath and his blood and the pounding of his heart, he had already let Sam down once, twice, the third time surely would be what it took to finally kill him.

Bobby had left them twenty minutes ago, had ruffled Dean’s hair like he was a child and had kissed Sam’s head like he was their father, but John had never loved like that, not for a long, long time. Dim memories of blonde curls and throaty laughter, of green eyes and dimples, their mother's face and the way that John had been softer then, airborne high beneath a wide branched tree and work roughed hands catching him by his ribs on the come down. John hadn’t been the same though, not after the fire, and Sam had never known him to be anything otherwise for all that Dean had wanted to love him. But loving someone who hated you was hard, and Bobby had left them twenty minutes ago with idle affection and a claim about needing to go to the store.

Twenty minutes and Sam hadn’t let go, but for all that Sam hadn’t let go, he hadn’t spoken either. Not a single word from that wide mouth, not his name or a question for all that Sam gave him tentative smiles, for all that Sam watched him from the corner of his eyes. Sam hadn’t said anything though, just held his hand tight and ate with his non-dominant just so he wouldn’t have to let go and and Dean didn’t dare question him. Didn’t dare question, didn’t dare let go, except-

Except, Sam hadn’t said a single, God damn word, Sam hadn’t said his _name_ , and Dean didn’t know where to begin with how wrong that was.

Sammy was bright eyes and a wide smile, the kid who never shut up. So much knowledge in a too thin body and Dean had never been able to keep up, but this...this wasn’t Sammy, not anymore. This was Sam, something had changed, something had broken, something had been pulled from his brother and etched from his insides and Dean didn’t know if he would ever get it back. Something was different in how he smiled, something crystalline, rose window shuttered and fractal vague in those golden eyes and he wanted to kiss at the sleepless bruises in the hollows beneath and tell Sam everything was alright, smudge them with his mouth until they weren’t there anymore.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

His voice was quiet, hospital room hush and funeral parlor stilted and Dean wanted to wince. Sam though, Sam just watched him, sharp eyes and a wide mouth and that silvery scar on his cheek, watched him with something in his eyes that Dean didn’t recognize. That hurt then, that set an ache behind his ribs and in the thick of his spine, he didn’t recognize something about Sam, and why would he? Six years of separation and three of presumed death come and gone hung over them like the restless ghost he had expected his little brother to be, and Dean didn’t know which one of them had more trouble with it, Dean for how he couldn’t look away or Sam for how he seemed incapable of letting go.

Sam blinked at him, dark lashes and muddled sunshine for eyes and seemed to just grip his hand tighter.

He pulled then, pulled and Dean felt like his heart might come out of his chest, because it looked like Sam leaving him. Getting to his feet with an empty chair between them and Dean’s leg gone cold, that felt like Sam leaving him, distancing them, like Dean had done it then. Like he had said too much, like he had said wrong and oh, but poor timing and ill-chosen words were nothing new to him yet it caused something to clatter in his psyche at the thought of Sam leaving him for it too, of Sam leaving him again because he had said too much, because he wasn’t good enough.

He’d never been good enough, had he?

From under the table, Rosie whined, a high, reedy sound that Dean wasn’t given time to dwell on. Instead, Sam pulled him too, impractical by the way that his body was pulled over Sam’s now empty chair just so Dean didn’t let go. Nearly childish in the way that Sam insisted he pull him, how Sam’s mouth quirked at the way his knee banged against the table leg, at the way Dean quietly swore. He clambered to his feet with a stomping sound, boots heavy and his weight uneven but Sam didn’t give him time to make it better. He pulled, firm grip and separation anxiety bruises lanced into the spaces between his knuckles and Dean went without question, would always follow where his little brother led.

Sam knew this house, he knew these walls, walked backward from the kitchen to the start of the hall so he could watch Dean, so he could blink those muddled sunshine eyes and give that shy smile. Sam was comfortable here, safe here with the barbed wire scars on his throat and his bare arms, the slice along his cheek, Sam looked like he felt at home here. He turned then, pulled Dean along by his hand through the hall he remembered sprinting through when he was less than half his current age, and he watched as Sam traced fingertips across the faded wallpaper as they went.

So this was what it was like to be in love.  

He had almost forgotten, so much time and what he had thought to be death between them, he had nearly forgotten what it was like to love someone. To love someone like this, to feel like he couldn't breathe, like he couldn't stop falling, Sam had always been a wildfire in his lungs, but Dean had almost forgotten how it felt to be alive like he only ever was when Sam looked at him.

Rosie trailed behind them, little clacks from her nails on the hardwood, she was never far from Sam, had wedged herself beside Dean and only crowded him further into Sam’s space. Sam, who held his hand tight even though it must have put a strain on his shoulder, Sam who led him without having said a single word even though he had given Dean everything he would ever need just by breathing, by being. Sam who caused lilacs to bloom in the hollow graves between his ribs and his blood to pump violet petal soft and syrup thick.

He expected to be lead to the study once more, the place Sam had been in when Dean’s world had come back online, to the sunshine he had slumbered in while Dean’s heart had come alive and his lungs had learned to breathe again. The old books, the familiar room, but Sam had other ideas. Sam pulled them up short, Sam stopped them at a door in the hall that Dean recognized for how it lead to Bobby’s basement, and only then did Sam look at him.

He didn’t say anything though, just stared with a thin pressed mouth and a furrow to his brows, watched Dean like he thought Dean might disapprove.

So he smiled, so Dean smiled for all that he felt like he was going to shake out of his skin and he gripped Sam’s hand a little tighter. A swipe of his thumb across the side of his palm, Sam’s hand was warm in his, his fingers long and the tips work roughed by something that Dean didn’t know. There was so much he didn’t know, so much he needed to learn, so many things he needed to relearn. His little brother felt less like the firebright maelstrom he had been and instead like something slighter, softer and shadowed in ways that Dean understood for all that he didn’t recognize them to Sam’s skin. Oak leaves on his breath and French willows for his bones, Dean had only ever known him to be vibrant, to be barely contained and almost too much, but Sam was softer now.

Sam was quiet, now.

Osmunda in his footsteps and the swaying shadow that he cast, pink peonies in his smiles, Sam was a mirage, a desolate desert trick of the eye made of distilled sunshine and hesitant glances, and Dean was terrified he would be gone if he blinked too long. If he didn’t breathe right, if he didn’t hold on well enough, Sam had always been particularly gifted at slipping free from things he didn’t want to live with, to deal with. Dean remembered Flagstaff, he remembered the panic and the way that desperation had curdled in his blood, irritation and frustration and something close to contempt because how could Sam run from them, from _him?_

All the same did he remember Stanford, did he remember the bruises on Sam’s ribs and the underfed hollows to his cheeks. The way that Sam had begun to watch the world with weary eyes, the shuttered expressions he had begun to give. How he had flinched, both from John and the whiskey on his breathe and from Dean and the way he had yelled in the heavy deluge of Baton Rouge midnight rain, how Sam had left like he had told him to, how Sam hadn’t turned around.

One of them would survive John Winchester, one of them would live through the alcohol laced carnage that was the Winchester patriarch if it was the last thing Dean did. He had sworn this to himself, had given Sam an out, had let the better of them escape because he had thought this life would kill him, but Sam deserved so much better. Instead, he had thought that the world had taken Sam from him, a fire snuffed out the only light in his life just like it had taken their mother from them before Sam could even recognize her smile and Dean just-

He couldn’t lose Sam, not again, not ever.

Sam opened the door with a quiet creak, and he led Dean down the stairs, never once letting go of his hand. The stairs felt sturdy now, didn’t shift and groan under his weight like they had when he was younger. No give under his feet, a handrail on either side, there were lights in the basement. There were lights, there looked to be the same wooden flooring that ran through the upstairs, furniture and storage and shelving in a place that had been dark, dimly lit and dusty the last time he had ventured down here at fifteen.

It didn’t look like a basement anymore, looked finished, looked clean. Looked lived in, looked welcoming from the couch to the soft recliners, the books on the walls and the pictures hanging in between. Dare he say it looked normal, it looked civilian, it didn’t look like it belonged in the home of a hunter. But it felt right somehow, felt like a relief, a weight off his shoulders to know that Sam had been here at least in the time that Dean hadn’t been able to keep him safe.

Safe, with solid walls and with a sturdy roof, safe with something steady, with something real. Sam had always wanted a home, had always wanted something more permanent, and Dean had never been able to give him that no matter how hard he had tried.

Dean had never really been able to give him much of anything, had he?

A bitter thought, it sent a sour acid burn in the back of his throat, matched the faint prickle of raspberry leaves he could taste there. He wanted to scrub at his eyes, wanted to turn around, but that would mean letting go of Sam, that would mean _leaving_ Sam and he didn’t-he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to do that, not for long, if ever. He had missed this for so long, hollow ribs and grave dirt heavy lungs with a dead heart gone black and quiet, he had forgotten what it was like to breathe, to feel something close to human.

He couldn’t help the tremble to his bones, because surely this was a dream, some horrible pre-death induced hallucination brought on by Elisha and that bitter candy. This couldn’t be real, this couldn’t be right, he didn’t deserve Sam, not after the things he had done, the people he had killed. Muddled sunlight and the earthen smell of sun warmed soil, Sam was summertime, Sam was cool grass beneath his feet and red tulips caught in his lungs and Dean didn’t want to ruin him too.

Sam stopped then, grip tight on his hand and a sweet kiss that promised bruises, his little brother turned. Twisted on his heel and watched him, half a head taller than Dean himself now for all that his shoulders had broadened, for all that he still looked small, strength to those arms even though his bones were surely hollow and baby bird brittle. Something narrowed in his expression, a pinch to his brows and the corners of his sharp eyes, a downward pull to his wide mouth, Sam was displeased.

Sam wasn’t happy and that never meant good things for him, Sam left when he wasn’t happy, Sam disappeared. Flagstaff, Stanford, that time when Sam was six and snuck out of their room and Dean found him at the park down the block over an hour later, Sam had always been particularly gifted at slipping free from any cage he didn’t want to be in regardless of the cost.

He felt like he was going to be sick, because Dean knew that expression, and he held Sam’s hand then with the same tight, bruise kissing grip that Sam held his with.

“Sam-”

Sam didn’t try to leave though, didn’t pull away or distance himself, palm to palm and skin hot to the touch. He pressed closer instead, invaded Dean’s space with a fleeting hesitance in his eyes, crimson columbines in his bones but he pressed them tight together, chest to chest and scarcely any room to breathe. Sam caught his free hand, held both of his scarred palms within his own and took the one still cool from a lack of Sam’s love, and pressed it to his chest. Laid it over his heart, palm flat against the steady, sacred pounding of it and Dean’s face burned, his eyes watered.

His fingers curled in the soft black of the shirt Sam wore, fisted over the living beat of his heart and his face burned. His face burned, grew wet with how fresh tears spilled over from his aching eyes and his lips pulled back in a sob. He released Sam’s hand then, let go just to he could snap an arm around his waist instead, so he could pull Sam so tight against him that his hand became trapped around his brothers heart. The other knotted in the back of his shirt and Dean held on tight, gripped Sam to him like he hadn’t been able to in years apart from their reunion in Bobby’s kitchen.

He could feel Sam move then, long arms pulled around him and there was strength there, there was something solid and steady and real in that hold. Sam wrapped his arms around him like he had done it all their lives, like Dean was the one who needed sheltered, needed held close and kept safe. His face pressed against Sam’s throat, his mouth to that thick barbed scar and he gripped tighter, cried harder. Sam kept them steady, Sam held him up where Dean had always held him, where Dean had had to hold himself for the last six years and he didn’t know if he cried now because Sam hadn’t left him, or because he wasn’t alone.

Muffled sounds against Sam’s throat, was this how his brother had felt at twelve when he would cry and Dean had pulled him close, locked him in tight? Wrapped up and warm, the pound of Sam’s heart beneath his hand, those were Sam’s fingers in his hair, on his back. He had no reason to be like this, had no right, not with the things he had done, but it had been years since he had felt safe, felt like it bad been a lifetime since he had held his brother, longer still since he had been held.

A rumble against his mouth, quiet and a little stilted, but there was sound there. Sound where Sam hadn’t said anything all morning, where the got the feeling Sam hadn’t said anything in a good long while. He clung tighter, the arm around his brothers back clenched, fingers pulling at that shirt until he thought it might tear. But that was, there was still sound, there was still noise, quiet and a little off like he wasn’t sure of himself but Sam carried on all the same.

He knew those sounds, he knew that song, and the death rattle of his crying turned into garbled, quiet laughter instead, pressed into the silvery skin of Sam’s throat.

“Are you humming Hey Jude?”

His little brother shivered against him with every pass of his mouth against Sam’s throat, but he pulled Dean closer, purposefully dug his chin into the top of his had.

How many times had he done that to Sam just to feel his little brother laugh like he did now?

His chuckle pressed against Sam’s skin, his hand fisted a little harder against his heart, he could see the flare of the tulip against his inner arm, Dean could see the marks of his brothers love on his skin for all that Sam hadn’t been with him. He held Sam tighter, clung to him more and refused to tell himself it was anything else, wouldn’t lie to himself like that, not after this long with just himself for company.

Sam rocked them a little bit, pulled them, walked them backwards in wide legged sway that had Dean pressing another bout of laughter into his brothers throat- how long had it been since he’d laughed?

“We can’t walk like this, Sammy.”

A grunt, he could feel it against his chest, he could nearly taste it with how close they were pressed together. Sam was vocal for all that he didn’t say a single word, animated for all that he was quieter now than Dean remembered, softer. He didn’t let go even when Dean laughed against his throat, one hand at the back of his throat and another on the low of his back, kept them seamed together with his hands at the rose bloom at the base of his spine and the winter shy bud at the base of his throat.

Sam didn’t know them, hadn’t seen them, but Dean knew exactly where they lay and he could feel the burn of his brothers touch against them, the melt of his heat against Dean’s skin and he wondered if that touch would set a blush of color to them, turn them purple, turn them red, maybe white though he would never be so lucky, enchantment and love but never would he be worthy of such touch, of such affection.

They stumbled a little, but Sam didn’t let go of him to catch them and instead it was Dean, Dean who smacked a hand out to the closest wall for all that the one between them still held fast to his brothers heartbeat.

 _“Samuel William!_ ”

He could feel Sam laughing and the sound was rattling, rusted hinges and just a little off kilter, but God, it set a sway to the dead dry wildflowers between his ribs all the same. Strained like Sam didn’t laugh often, like he didn’t know how anymore and that made two of them, what a pair they were. His hand made a quiet squealing sound against the wall as Sam kept walking them forward and he felt small then, knew in that moment just how much taller than him Sam was even if the difference was slight.

There was a strange echo here, an offbeat kind of knowing, he had done this before. Four years old and stood on the tops of John’s shoes, dancing around the kitchen to the sound of their mothers laughter as she leaned against the counter, as she rested her hands on the swell of her belly. He had done this to Sam when they were younger, toddled around hotel rooms with Sam’s hands in his and his little feet on top of his just to listen to his brother giggle.

A series of distant memories of a time too far gone and too many people that had slipped through his fingers and Dean felt something burn in the back of his throat that tasted suspiciously like more tears.

“I can’t see, Sammy, don’t know what you’re takin’ me to when I can’t see, little brother.”

Sam paused then, stopped his strange waddle walk that Dean knew the feel of in his own legs. A tight squeeze of his arms, a pull until Dean was snug against his chest and he held back with just as much force, wrapped up tight with Sam’s heart throbbing just above his and a strain in his arms. Slowly, carefully then, like he was scared to hurt him or let him go too quick, Sam released him, long arms limp at his sides and something wide and a little wild in his eyes. Dean wanted to touch him then for all that he had just gotten Sam to let go, wanted to pin his little brother against his chest where he could hold him, wanted to pull his unspoken love into his arms where Dean could shelter him.

Sam had never done well with being confined though, and he had a feeling his sharp eyed little brother would tolerate it even less now. So Dean kept his hands to himself, followed Sam in how Sam had taken back his, and he smiled, gave the wide eyed willow of his brother an expression as gentle as he could manage. He had never done well with soft things, had never done well with delicate but oh, that was Sam now more so than ever before, and he would have to learn lest he scared him, lest he hurt him, lest Sam left him.

The very thought had him wanting to reach forward then, a motion aborted before it even really had a chance to start but Sam knew. Sam seemed to always know, especially now, something different about the way his brother watched him, more attuned to something that Dean couldn’t see, didn’t understand. Because Sam took his hand again, touch gentle now, grip far less tight, and he gave Dean a smile in response to his own for all that Sam’s was shy and slow. Dean treasured that smile though, wanted to tuck it into his heart just like he wanted to kiss Sam’s mouth but this wasn’t the time, this wasn’t the place, Sam didn’t need that from him.

He was content just to have his little brother again, content just to hold his little loves hand.

Easy and slow, sure of himself, Sam pulled him along. Rosie behind them, he hadn’t even heard her on the stairs, hadn’t even felt her before but he did now, knew the way she had pressed herself full body against his legs and leaned. He wanted to pet her, but Sam had other ideas, eased him along until he had no choice but to follow, as if there would ever be any other choice to be made.

His love wasn’t so little anymore though, was he?

Taller than Dean, even if Dean himself was still wider in the shoulders, Sam’s face was sweeter for all of his scars and the shadows beneath his eyes. His brother had always been water lily soft, hot summer air and melted ice pop sticky and Dean never seemed to be able to get enough. A sigh when Sam laced their fingers together, the quiet puff fill and exhale slow of his breath and Dean swayed after Sam where he led like a flower to the sun.

A short walk down a wide hall, there was a bathroom there where they didn’t used to be, there were lights there where there didn’t used to be and what he had once known to be a large storage room was-

There was a bed there against one wall, pressed against one of the flat spaces in the otherwise nearly round space. It dripped with soft blankets, unmade and looking well used, a pink and violet quilt that Dean had never seen before, faded cornflower sheets so pale they were nearly white. There was soft, sweet color there on the bed and more color still on the walls, a champagne sort of cream that went from corner to corner to corner. Bookshelves here and there, filled with well loved looking tomes and a snow globe of a scene he didn’t recognize, an oversized ceramic snail and a miniature grand piano, things that he had never thought of in connection with his little brother before for all that they made him smile.

A desk there, caddy corner the bed and covered with a book, a few papers, a large oil lamp with curling plumes of rose, of wisping shades of burgundy and of delicate licks of gold inlaid into the wide swell of its glass body. Warm toned wood in both the desk and its chair, in the bed frame, in the bookshelves, a large, fluffy dog bed between the bed and the desk. The floor was the same wood, and he watched as Sam tugged him into the room, as Sam pulled him until he stood at the edge of the circular, faded blue china rose rug that emphasized just how round the rest of the room tried to be.

Sam let go of his hand then, and Dean watched as they knotted in the front of the shirt his little brother wore. Faded, well worn, except, he knew that shirt, knew the way it settled on his shoulders and how it felt soft to the touch, how it had been missing since just after Baton Rouge. He had thought he had left it behind, he thought he had forgotten it, accidentally abandoned it like he himself had just recently been left.

Instead, Sam wore it, the Metallica shirt with the cigarette burns at the bottom hem, with the design faded because Dean had only ever been able to use a laund-o mat. The shirt he had saved up for when he was fifteen that his little brother now wore like a second skin, and it did things to him in that moment to see Sam wearing his clothes like that. Sent a flashfire through his blood and Dittany of Crete blooming in his abdomen, unfurling in his veins.

He wanted to know what Sam tasted like wearing his clothes, but this wasn’t the time or the place, Sam didn’t need that sort of thing.

There was a nervousness there though, a hesitance in the way that his little brother stood, the way he shifted his weight between his too long legs. It had been a while since Dean had seen him nervous, had been a while since he had seen him as anything other than the cedar that made his bones and the bluebells of his breathing. So strange was it now to have Sam like this before him, to have his little brother looking so unsure, to have his not so little love alive.

“This...this your room, Sammy?”

A delicate blush curled along his brothers cheeks, a soft little flush of color and Sam nodded. His hair was pretty like that, faded jeans and a well work shirt that didn’t really belong to him, with his shy smile and his quiet pride, amaryllis blooming in his teeth, the sockets of his eyes.

Sam was proud though and so Dean smiled, Dean watched his little love as Sam twisted on his toes, bare feet against the soft plush of the rug that Dean was scared to step on. His eyes took in the room then as Sam went looking for something at the desk, as Rosie slipped past him to spread out on her bed. Tall walls but maybe it was the color playing tricks on his eyes, a white ceiling but there was something there. A shadow maybe, some kind of shading, but that shape was too precise, there was too much detail there, there was _something_ there.

Lines and shapes, something he didn’t recognize, just a shade off from the color it was supposed to be, a faint grey instead of crisp white and he knew it shouldn’t be there for all that he didn’t know what it was.

“You need to repaint the ceili- _ooph!”_

Sam shoved something into his stomach, a coy grin, a grin, toothy and stretched, wide plush lips and dimples in his cheeks. Dean had missed that grin, those dimples and how they cut into Sam’s cheeks, the way that his eyes crinkled at the corners and the way he squinted. Sam looked childish then, looked impish, looked gap toothed small and innocent spiteful toddler glee, he pushed the thing a little harder against Dean’s stomach.

Just far enough to the side, it dug into the stitches there, sent a bloom of pain across his abdomen, into his chest. Pulled at the yellow twine that held him tight together and threatened to tear it, threatened to turn it red and seep his blood out into his shirt, bleed his heart dry until he had nothing left to give.

Because he knew this thing, he knew this book, A journal, hardcover, dark green and thick, wider than he had remembered it being. Except he knew this book, except he knew its contents and he knew the way his little brother looked hunched over in the grass while he painstakingly filled out a page, knew how he looked stretched out on the motel bed with his legs in the air and a pen between his teeth, the curve of his spine a sweet, sinful dip. He had the predecessor to this, the book that had started it all kept lovingly in his duffle even though he had memorized each and every page.

Carefully he opened it, took it from the holy fire lick of pain that it lit across his side and held it with a reverent sort of gentle in his hands. A faint crease on the cover from where it had been scored by the spine of another book, but the pages were less stiff now, but the spine didn’t make that same quiet creaking sound now. The binding still held though, none of the pages shifted, except, there was more now. More pages filled, more careful writing and delicate drawings, he could see where Sam’s hand had gotten more steady, he could see where his little brother had found his rhythm with the pieces, had given quiet, dry humor to lace in through the entries so subtle that he had to know where to look.

His dreams never got that right, Sam never finished the book.

A high, tight pain in his chest, a slow binding, a a barbed wire constraint, fitting that his insides would match his little brother’s skin. Torn up, shredded, he felt left raw then, he felt chewed up and left in the sun but Sam watched him with those bright, impossible eyes and a quiet expression on his beautiful, perfect face. Sam watched him with patience, his little brother had always been patient even if it was because he had hurt someone, Sam waited while his breathing stuttered and turned to a trembling wheeze, as his face grew hot, Sam watched him because Sam was, Sam was-

“You’re actually real this time?”

A liquid gold blink, and Sam squinted, shrugged a little with both hands slightly aloft, and Dean could almost hear one of his philosophical rants, the existentialism that used to drip from that pretty, pretty mouth that he had eaten up like honey. A Sam kind of answer, a real answer, any too true dream or just off fever pitch had never gotten it right, those Sam’s had always agreed with him without hesitation, without consideration. But Sam always had a question for everything, even the things he shouldn’t have and his brain had never managed to get that right.

This Sam shrugged though, this Sam seemed indecisive over a question that any other person would have found so simple, but Sam had always questioned everything, had always picked things apart with that firecracker brain of his so much that Dean had only ever been able to stop and stare.

“I di-didn’t die down there?”

Something turned fierce in his expression then, wendigo in his sights sharp and vampire under his blade focus and Dean’s insides went liquid, went hot just like they always did whenever Sam looked like that. His little brother closed the distance between them with a sharp move of his long legs, and he caught Deans face in his long fingered hands, gentled faintly by the way that Dean couldn’t help but flinch, recent memories of black slit eyes and sharp fingernails etched into his memory. Sam crowded his space though, hands curled nearly to the back of Dean’s head and he held on like offering comfort to the elder was something he had had the chance to do often.

He knocked their foreheads together, that book caught between them and Dean’s hand splayed against the crisp drawing of a sprig of hawthorn blossoms.

He stared like that, those bright eyes and that sharp expression, and he didn’t blink until Dean did. Steady, sedum in his heartbeat and elm bark for his skin and he was a comfort for how quiet he was, something to feel, something with which to cling. He didn’t let go even when Dean’s vision started to haze over, dripping and wet, and he didn’t let go when his breath punched out of him on a wheeze of the youngers name.

Instead, he tipped Dean’s head down, and he planted his mouth on his forehead just below his hairline, an action so strange to feel for all that Dean had done it for Sam throughout their lives.

They stood there for a while, soft champagne cream walls and a delicate china rose rug that he was afraid to step on, chest to chest save for a book that he hadn’t seen since he was twenty-two and could feel his own heart breaking between his teeth. They were older now, they were different now, Sam broken in way that he didn’t understand and Dean knew that he himself had changed.

He didn’t know how long they stood like that, Sam’s fingers in his hair and his own doing everything they could not to wrinkle the delicate pages between them. Long enough for his breathing to even out again, long enough for his eyes to dry again and Dean leaned in a little, pressed himself against Sam and felt his better half breathing against his chest. This was everything he could have hoped for, this was all that he really needed, just to know Sam was alive, just to be able to feel Sam breathing against him.

From the doorway, Rosie gave a quiet whine, having risen at some point and only then did Sam release him. Another whine, a long, high sound and as he watched, Sam snapped his fingers twice and threw a hand out and Rosie took off, Dean could hear her on the stairs. Non verbal commands, comparatively silent but affective and there was a proud grin on Sam’s face.

Dean wanted to kiss that grin, he wanted to kiss those cheeks, taste Sam’s quiet laughter and his silent pride but Sam moved away. He tossed his head toward the open doorway and left Dean to follow, left him to set the book down carefully on the desk and hurry after his little brother and his dog. He didn’t pause at the threshold like wanted to, instead braced a hand on the rounded door frame and watched Sam smile at him from the base of stairs.

Down the hall and up those, it was easy to follow where Sam led, to watch the shift of his back as he walked and the way that he knew this house, knew himself. Into the kitchen, through that, he led Dean out onto the back porch through an open door and Rosie had already taken to the yard, demand seemingly met. Sam left her there though, let her do as she pleased and instead he took Dean’s hand again, laced their fingers together and fitted their souls back into one piece, soothed a savage, yawning chasm inside of him that the elder Winchester had through he would die with.

Bare footed, Sam stepped off the porch and down into the grass, away from the porch and away from Rosie and instead out into the sprawl of the backyard. And there were flowers there, things he knew the names of even if he didn’t recognize their uses, anise and cinquefoils, bitter smelling motherwort and more dandelions than he had expected to ever seen in a garden, houstonia and sunny little quite and orange crowned jonquil, Sam urged him to sit in the small clearing at the middle of it. The dandelions cut paths through all the other plants, stood as dividers and he didn’t recognize the shapes that they made but there was something there.

There were more flowers further in the yard, a sea of lavender that bracketed the back porch and moschatel dotted throughout the yard and circled around the trees, a wide bed of swaying peonies that separated the house and its yard from the scrapyard with its rust and its metal and memories.

It was beautiful here, it was safe here, something quiet in the air and soothing in a way that he had never known a house to be before, but he wasn’t sure if it was because of the flowers Sam had planted or if it was just Sam himself. Sam, who sat across from him, bare footed in the grass with his legs folded and the cuffs of his jeans rolled up to show the delicate bones of his ankles; Sam who smiled at him and set to work carefully selecting dandelions, anise and jonquils from the the space around them like it required the utmost care and attention. Sam who looked peaceful here, with his scarred skin and the way that there was dirt beneath his short nails, with his bottled summer sun eyes and his soft, wide mouth.

“I love you.”

Sam who paused in his motions, his weaving, lacing the plants he had carefully selected together into something that vaguely resembled a crown. Dean had a feeling he was going to be wearing that, had a hunch that he would know the weight of those flowers on his head here soon, but he didn’t have it in him to care. Not when Sam blushed like that, not when Sam smiled like that.

Not when Sam reached out one dirt dusty hand and gripped the full bloom of the tulip on his forearm and made Dean’s breath catch.


	4. Flowering Reed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a few, but I warned you that posting on this would be slow! unedited, posting so I can go make pie

He had arrived not long after lunch, late enough that it had been a bit of a lack of judgement for for Bobby to feed them but Dean hadn’t complained. 

Dean didn’t feel like he was going to be complaining about much of anything, not with Sam breathing next to him, not with Sam watching him with those trapped sunshine fox eyes and smiling that wide, sweet, dimpled stretch. What had he to complain about when Sam wove flowers between his fingers and held the crown then aloft as he waited for Dean to lean forward, as if Dean deserved such a thing. Crowns were for better men than he, crowns were for good men who had done good things but the one Sam settled upon his head was bitter and sweet and alive like any precious metal could never have been. 

The flowers had curled around his ears though, across his forehead, and Sam had smiled at him sweet and pretty and soft like Dean had given him the whole world. And Dean had wanted to cry, Dean had wanted to close the distance between them with his hands, with his mouth. Had wanted to cup Sam’s sharp hinged jaw in his hands and pull himself onto his knees so he could kiss that wide, curling smile for the first time in his life, so he could be tall enough once more to make Sam feel as safe and loved and whole as Sam had made him feel just with the rise and fall of his chest. 

Instead, his hands had curled in the grass between his crossed legs, and Dean had smiled at his little brother. He had stayed where Sam had seated him when the other had started to carefully tend to the garden that circled out around them in a pattern that he didn’t understand, watchful eyes on the careful way his brothers bare feet carried him between the flowers and the dandelions and the herbs like he had done this dance more often than not. And it was a dance, the way Sam bent to test stems and flowers and leaves, the gentle touch of his hands and the mindful, easy placement of his feet, Dean watched with attentive eyes as the center of his world instead revolved around him. 

But Sam didn’t talk, Sam hadn’t talked, so neither did he. 

Silence settled on them with a velvetine kind of soft and he tasted melianthus, he smelled burgundy, his heart was tight and his lungs aching overful and Dean leaned, weight on his busted knuckles in the cool grass. For he had become rooted where Sam had left him, even if only temporarily, and he followed his brother like a sun seeking flower with every direction Sam moved, for his little love was the only warmth and life that he would ever need. 

Loathe was he to say a thing to disturb Sam’s peace, and the tranquil that had overcome them, but there were worlds burning there, but there were apologies unchecked bubbling there within his blood, but there was penance long festered there within the marrow of his bones.

“I never left you. Not-not on purpose, God Sammy, if I’d known where you were I would have been here, I would have come here. I broke my phone, lost it when a lake spirit was trying to drown me and I didn’t think to try and, and get anything turned over from it when I got a new one. It...it was a year later in Michigan that this kid in a shop told me I could recover my lost stuff.”

He swallowed, molasses thick, heavy and slow and anxiety was bitter in his mouth, mourning was a cloying taste on his tongue. 

Sam had stopped moving, thin veined laurel with an unbreakable core, Dean could see his bare feet for all that he was too uncertain to look his brother in the face lest he see disappointment, lest he see something darker, something meaner. 

“I didn’t come running when you needed me, Sammy. I-I left you alone and hurt, and I’m so fucking sorry little brother, I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sor-”

A sun hot hand pressed against his mouth, flat palmed and long fingered. There was a gentleness there for how firm that pressure was, how final, and Sam had crouched down in front of him in the grass while Dean had worked himself into a tizzy. Golden fire in his eyes but oh, there was a quiet compassion there, there was a silent resonance there as Sam watched him with a furrowed brow and a downturned pinch to his mouth. 

He shook his head, slow and deliberate so he knew that Dean saw it, and he took Dean’s submission filled fist and pressed it flat against his heart. Rich green blades of grass spilled down the front of him then where Dean’s had had let go, and Sam watched him, Sam blinked at him. Pressure, he gave pressure in how he forced Dean’s palm against the throb of his heart and he gave it further still in how he let go of Dean’s wrist to grab a fistful of his shirt instead. To force the meat of his own palm against the rabbit tremble pound of the heart that Sam didn’t even realized he owned.

He gripped though, curled fingertips and heavy pressure, and he watched Dean with those starfire eyes. There was something solid there, something otherworldly and bright and Dean didn’t understand why he hadn’t said a word, but he knew that Sam didn't need to say a single thing when he looked at Dean like that. 

The hand on his mouth let loose, and instead, Sam held the back of his head, laced his fingers into Dean’s hair. He pulled him forward like that, made him lean like that, pressed their foreheads together until the only thing Dean could see was his face, the crest of his cheekbones and the sun gold of his eyes, the jagged, dripping tear scar beneath a single. Sam kept him close and Sam made him look, made him see the shadows and the haunted depths that had been bore in his brothers skin that he didn’t want to see for all that he refused to look away.

And then Sam gripped his heart tighter, fingertips digging into his skin with the promise of a vivid, love steeped bruise.

And then Sam released the touch to his hair to instead smack that hand across the back of Dean’s skull and crack their foreheads together.

He winced a little bit, his own eyes narrowed a little bit but Dean watched as Sam simply stared, as Sam just watched him with those eyes and an all too serious expression.

“Okay.”

Because they had had this sort of conversation more times than he could count for all that they had grown older and their roles had chanced. Dean had always refused to accept apologies from Sam where he thought they weren’t due, refused to let his little brother fester and guilt over things he could never have any possible hope of controlling and now it seemed to be his turn instead. The rules had stayed the same for all that the players had been rearranged on the board, nothing had really changed even though Sam hadn’t said a single word and Dean wasn't sure what to do with this. 

“It wasn’t my fault.”

Coarse words, hard on his throat and hard on his ears, but he said them because he needed to, remembered how he had made Sam give up the guilt on things he had had no say in. It had taken a weight from his little brothers shoulders, and he knew that Sam did it in turn to him now for the very same reason. But there was something grating in having that guilt taken from him after all this time, settled something hollowed in his brittle bones and wrong within the tar bubble of his blood to have that sunbeam stare watch him with so much  _ trust _ despite the desperate shadows that lived within.

Sam watched him fire bright and sunrise sweet, but he asked so much of Dean. 

He may as well have put those shadows there with his own two hands for all that he hadn’t been there. He hadn’t come running to the rescue like the hero he had always touted himself to be, and so Dean may as well have laid those scars into Sam’s sun loved skin like blooming bruises from his overeager fingers. Sam had always bruised easy, Sam had always turned the kind of colors from Dean’s fists and fingertips during training that had given Dean pause, had made his breath catch and his head spin. He had always wanted to feel, had always wanted to taste, but Sam had never been his,  _ would _ never be his, and he would never push his luck like that. 

He would never scare Sam like that. 

Never would he want to scare his little love like that, and never would he run, never would he stray, but he wasn’t sure anymore what it felt like to breathe without the throb of guilt and loneliness twined around the spindles of his ribs. Who was he supposed to be when his very foundation had becoming missing Sam, having failed Sam, having  _ let Sam die? _ Dean wasn’t necessarily sure how to really be whole anymore, not like he needed to, not like Sam deserved even if that wasn’t what Sam asked of him, he couldn’t just smile and sigh and expect all the torment that lived behind his eyes to simply lay itself to rest.

Men like him didn’t deserve that kind of happy. 

Fox sharp eyes narrowed, and with such little distance between them he could see nothing but forever reflected there, a wealth of things that maybe, just maybe he could have had in another life. He wondered if Sam would smile at him the same where they any different, would his little brother lean into him the same and have a silent demand to hold his hand that Dean just couldn’t deny or would he too be different, would he too be changed by something that Dean couldn’t begin to predict. No, no that would never, he would never settle for that sort of life, that sort of world. 

Sam was perfect for all his temper and his occasional petty tendency, Sam would never be anything less than perfect. 

Those bright, sharp eyes narrowed though, and he didn’t have time to brace himself before Sam hit him again, a skimming smack up the back of his head that made him tip forward. A wince as their foreheads cracked together, a faint wince as it made his teeth rattle, but Sam was still cheeky it seemed, Sam was still persistent and for all the time that had passed and the lack of one another that had left Dean feeling dug out and empty, Sam still seemed to know exactly how his head worked. 

“Look, I’ll work on it. It’s not, this ain’t rea- _ don’t you hit me again Samuel, I will take that hand from you, I swear to God _ .”

He let go of Sam’s chest to instead clutch his wrists, the one that held his own heart and the one from behind his head, warm and real and there was something else there. Barbed wire scars looped across warm flesh, a mire of silvery smooth skin where it should have tanned and he couldn’t fix that but there was something more. Faint indentations on either wrist like puncture marks, like something had punched through the skin between the barbed wire binding and he didn’t understand and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to, but Dean knew that he wanted to kiss those scars, and he hoped they didn’t hurt. 

“I lived for three years thinking I’d chased away the best friend I would ever have. I spent three years thinking that I’d made you hate me, that you would never pick up that phone, that you would never open that door because I had told you to get out and you had gone. And I was so fucking proud of you Sammy, I still am, but I ain’t built to be alone like that. And then I just-I thought you  _ died,  _ Sam. You were dead, you were gone and there was no getting you back, no saying I was sorry. I thought you burnt up to a crisp with the rest of that apartment, I saw the pictures and read the police report and it was like I died there with you. I spent six years thinking you hated me and three thinking that I’m the reason that you’re dead, I ain’t gonna just be able to let that go little brother, I don’t know how to not hurt like that anymore.”

God, he hoped they didn’t hurt, Sam didn’t deserve to hurt ever again. 

Sam had hurt so much in the six years they had been apart, Dean could see it on his skin and he could see it in his eyes and he just want Sam to laugh like he used to. Church bell chiming and summer wind wild, he just wanted Sam to look hadn’t been beaten, hadn’t been bound or carved into.

He just wanted Sam to talk to him. 

Instead, Sam just blinked at him, an infinite sadness in his expression  that Dean had helped put there. He was stronger than Sam, bigger in girth and strength for all that Sam was longer, Sam was taller. His hands easily encircled the delicate bones of Sam’s wrists, there was blood under his nails and scars on his knuckles but Sam was golden. But Sam leaned into him, leaned against his chest despite the way that Dean still held his wrists and he was forced to let go for worry of straining Sam’s shoulders. 

A hum of a sound, low and graveled and unsure, and Sam tucked his head beneath Dean’s chin, tipped forward from his crouch until his legs were splayed in the grass and his weight had fallen to Dean to support. He took it happily if with a startled exhale, arms full of little brother and his heart tight, Dean wrapped himself and his aching emotions around Sam, hid his face against the sun hot strands of his mop of hair. 

His skin smelled like something that Dean didn’t recognize, floral and cloying but it burned in his lungs and he breathed in deep anyway.

“Yeah?”

Sam didn't answer, not really, but Dean didn't expect much at this rate. 

Instead, Sam leaned harder against him, dead weight with his arms limp around Deans shoulders. The way he pushed was purposeful, the way he sagged full of intent but Dean didn't have much to brace himself on even if he wanted to. It had been years since Sam had been close to him like this, that crash of bone in Bobby's kitchen the call to attention at the end of an intermission, but this was something familiar, this was more. This spoke of when he was five, nine, twelve, twenty one, this hallmarked to Sam trusting Dean with his weight because Sam was there and real and he trusted  _ him. _

“Brat.”

There were flowers just above his head, daffodils that he hoped he hadn’t crushed. Sam had put work into this, Sam had given effort to these plants and this garden and he didn’t want to ruin it. All the same, Sam splayed across his chest with loose arms at his shoulders and a knee sharp against the inside of Dean’s thigh. His weight was heavier than the last time they had fallen against one another like this, but Sam was still the same hard elbows and perfect aim to brace his weight against Dean’s ribs as he made himself comfortable. 

Some parts of Sam were still the same, and Dean pulled his arms a little tighter about his ribs, hoped they ground together and ached the way Sam had made his. 

Sam ducked his head though, sun loved cheek against the hollow just beneath Dean’s throat. He swallowed, locked his hands together and held fast at either wrist so he wouldn’t run the risk of letting go should he fall asleep. He didn’t ever want to let go, didn’t want to go another day without feeling Sam pressed in tight with his insistent refusal to understand just what personal space was.

Just enough shade from where tree branches swayed over head, but the sun was warm and Sam was heavy and real and Dean drifted there. 

“Boys, getcha asses up and get in here, I ain’t eaten dinner in the grass again. I see that smile Samuel, I’m too old for that shit. Up an in or Rosie an I’ll eat without ya.”

The sun had shifted since he had closed his eyes, had crawled across the sky and settled behind the house. His skin wasn't quite so warm anymore, the ground had gone a bit cold beneath him, beneath them. Them because Sam still stretched out atop him, them because Sam still had his arms loose around his shoulders, them because Sam still had his head on Dean's shoulder.

_ Them _ because Sam hadn’t left.

Sam hadn’t left  _ him. _

He moved then though, shifted his weight and made Dean’s breath catch as Sam’s temple ghosted across his mouth. There was something there other than Sam’s hair, something more than just skin, but it was there and gone and he didn’t dare call Sam out on the fractured stained glass that his body had become. Sam lifted up to his knees, one leg threaded between the sun nap lazy spread of Dean’s thighs and his hands planted on either side of Dean’s head. And he smiled, stared down at Dean with those impossibly golden eyes and those dimples in his cheeks and Dean couldn’t help but smile back.

For Sam was beautiful and Dean hoped he got to spend the rest of his life in love.

 

-

 

_ They’d blown into Indiana by way of Missouri and subsequently Illinois, following behind the taillights on John’s oversized truck, and he’d seemed to know exactly where he wanted to lead them. _

_ Instead of a lopsided rental or a cigarette stained hotel though, John wrenched his truck to the side of the road, trees for as far as Dean could see in any direction. He had a bad feeling about this, from the way that John stalked toward them in the pre-dawn gloom to the how he couldn’t ignore the gnawing reminder that he and Sammy hadn’t eaten anything since noon yesterday. Windows down though, Sam curled up on his side in the passenger seat and a bit slumped over, Dean knew how his brother breathed when he slept.  _

_ “He still out?” _

_ He couldn’t just look at Sam and the long shadows the stereo lights cast across his face, John had stooped down enough to stare into the quiet dark of the impala at him, at them. Old leather creaking a bit, his knuckles would have been pressure white if there were any light to see and Dean wanted to recoil, wanted to say something because John smelled like whiskey, bitter and sharp and Dean hated this.  _

_ He didn’t know how much John had had, but he knew they’d been following him for the last five hours down county roads without a single stop and he could only wonder.  _

_ “Yes sir, since Illinois.” _

_ A low sound, a slurring around the edges where John didn’t have enough control to keep his words straight, Dean couldn’t turn his head away. He stared at the monster that had replaced the father they might have once had, the burnt out shell of a man who sustained on alcohol and hatred and the whiskey stained memory of a woman that his little brother would never remember. He didn’t have time for them, he didn’t seem to want them any more than he needed them, and Dean wanted to snap the impala into reverse, wanted to spin off down the road and take off west, run and run until John couldn’t find them.  _

_ But Sam feigned sleep on the passenger side of the bench while Dean stood as the only safe point between him and a man who liked to hit him and he couldn’t.  _

_ “I want him up when you park. None of that going back to bed shit, you get fuckin’ work and you lay low till I come and get you.” _

_ “Where are we going?” _

_ A wide hand on his unshaved face and John sighed, and Dean just blinked, kept his voice a little light and a little confused but attentive all the same, knew better than to talk any louder than that, knew better than to question. John’s shoulders jostled as he dug into the pockets of the cargo jacket he wore, an alcohol sweat on his skin where Dean could see his throat that had turned him cold in the night air. A fistful of cash shoved through the window and he had to let go of the wheel then, two handed to catch it lest it scatter on the seat, the floor.  _

_ “Bedford’s ‘bout thirty minutes up the road. Figure it out.” _

_ A couple crumpled hundreds, three fifties and two cards, one of which he didn’t trust to not be maxed out. This wouldn’t get them through two weeks, this wouldn’t properly feed them past one and a half while taking care of a room somewhere, and Dean felt a swell of panic in his chest because they hadn’t eaten since noon yesterday, they hadn’t eaten anything proper since just before midnight the night before. Felt like they hadn’t slept in just as long, couldn’t with this sort of hunger, not when John told them to go, go, go.  _

_ “Dad, this isn-” _

_ “Don’t leave town.” _

_ He smacked the hood of the car when he went and Dean hoped it was hot, Dean hoped it hurt. The rattling, metallic sound it made, Sam would have jolted had he been asleep, would have come up with the startled, survivalist preservation jolt that stayed at the ready just beneath their skin with the sort of shit John put them through. Sam didn’t know how to live any different, and Dean didn’t remember much of anything else, and he knew Sam wasn’t asleep, confirmation where he hadn’t needed any.  _

_ He felt like he could puke if he had anything in him to lose.  _

_ John’s truck was loud even with the distance between them and Dean wanted to scream a little bit, lost in the dark then on a backcountry road with too many trees. Things lived in the dark, things they were supposed to kill and save people from, but while he’d managed to keep Sam out of it to the best of his ability thus far, there wasn’t much he could save his little brother from when he didn’t know where they were.  _

_ But the only other known person in the dark world that surrounded them disappeared around the bend in a blur of taillights and it was quiet suddenly. The forest was empty, quiet nocturnal birds and other animals the only thing he could hear over the low purr of the engine, and it was- that was something at least. The noise meant something, gave a little comfort even if it wasn’t much, because if the wild life felt comfortable then that was a start, but he had been conditioned to be afraid of the dark after fourteen years of living like this.  _

_ “We’re going to starve to death, aren’t we.” _

_ He shouldn’t have sounded so calm about it, he shouldn’t have been so resigned. Sam shouldn’t have been so quiet and empty and okay with the thought that they were going to die because they couldn’t eat. Dean wanted to scream, he wanted to cry, they weren’t old enough to deal with this sort of thing, they shouldn’t have to deal with this sort of thing just because John didn’t know how to be a half decent father.  _

_ “We’re not going to starve, Sammy.” _

_ His eyes were bright in the dark, burnish gold from the pale glow lights of the stereo that Dean could find like flames. He seemed so old like this, too tired and too hungry and they had seen too much, they had been put through too much, Dean just wanted to see his little brother smile again, wanted to hear him laugh. He was beautiful when he smiled, he was perfect when he laughed, and Dean was so in love that everything hurt, but Sam didn’t need that.  _

_ Sam didn’t need any of this, they should have just left him back with Pastor Jim in Blue Earth but fuck, that even hurt to think about.  _

_ “Your stomach stopped talking three hours ago.” _

_ They were past hungry and Dean knew it and Sam knew it too, and Dean watched as his little brother sat up, not quite so little for much longer. He could feel it in his bones that Sam was going to stretch soon, that Sam was going to get big and long soon and there would be nothing he could do to keep up. Sam would outpace him, Sam would outgrow him but for now Sam braced both hands on the bench seat and pulled himself up, blinked those sunbeam eyes at him like he had expected this.  _

_ And maybe he had, Sam had always been too smart for his own good and fuck, but Dean loved him, wanted to kiss him so hard Sam couldn’t breathe just as much as he wanted to spin the car around and drive the both of them to Blue Earth because he couldn’t breathe.  _

_ But Sam needed him, fourteen and tired eyed, Sam needed him to figure out what they were going to do, how they were going to get by. Because they didn’t know how long John would be gone, they didn’t know how long they would be here, but there was the same chance as always that John would forget them, that John would leave them. Maybe this was it, maybe this was the last time, abandoned somewhere in southern Indiana without even enough money to get to Bobby or Pastor Jim. John had told them not to leave though, and Dean had the horrible, sinking realization that he was going to be spending a lot of time on his knees, he was going to be spending a lot of time against a wall.  _

_ But Sam watched him with those eyes and he couldn’t fail right now, he couldn’t let Sam down even if he couldn’t let Sam know.  _

_ “C’mon, we’re gonna get something to eat, and then we’ll get a room figured out.” _

_ Sam always knew though, seemed to know just what to look for on his skin, in his eyes, and Sam never judged him for all that Dean always judged himself. They didn’t have a choice though, and better him than Sammy, it was always better him than Sammy. He had suffered this for the last four years, he would suffer it a little longer if it meant that Sammy had somewhere to sleep, Sam had something to eat. He needed to chase out some of that haunted hunger in his baby's eyes, needed Sam to stop looking quite so resigned, past scared and just fucking accepting, like this was their lot in life, like he expected to die at fourteen like this. _

_ Fuck, they didn’t deserve this. _

_ “Can we?” _

_ He wanted to cry.  _

_ Wanted to press his hands to his face and sink down into the bench seat and fucking bawl like he did sometimes when it was just him in the car, when John insisted they drive separate on a hunt just to always, always leave him behind by himself. Hitching breaths and angry sobs, wet faced and tight chested, John never knew, nobody needed to know, but Sam was right there and this wasn’t like a motel shower, Dean could stuff the meat of his palm between his teeth and drown out his own sounds under the water.  _

_ He wanted to cry like he had just five months prior out in New Mexico in that fucking hotel room, Sam held tight against his chest so he didn’t have to ever let him go because Sam had tried to take care of it for him, Sam had tried to help. Nothing would ever chase away the image of his baby so resigned and ready down on his knees with that man’s hands in Sammy’s hair, with his wide mouth open and waiting. Dean could still remember his own screaming, Dean could still remember the way he had beaten the man’s face in and the way he had wanted to vomit, wondering just how many times Sam had done this to try and help. _

_ Dean couldn’t cry right now, he didn’t have the luxury, not when he had the love of his life watching him with those trapped sun eyes, dependent on him like he shouldn’t have to be. _

_ He couldn't stumble, he couldn't fall, he refused to show a reason for Sam to decide to try and pick up the slack once more, he couldn't take another heartbreak panic of finding Sam on his knees with his mouth ready for a stranger just so they could eat. _

_ “Yeah Sammy, we can. I think I want pancakes.” _

_ Practice kept his voice strong, practice kept his voice smooth, he was a hero here, he had to be, he needed to be, both for Sam and for himself. They didn’t have an option for him to be anything else, because if he faltered then Sam would try to pick up the slack and Dean refused to ever let that happen again. He couldn’t let it happen again, he needed Sam as safe and as happy as he could claw fingered manage even if it cost his own skin to do it.  _

_ A pull at the gear shift and the impala’s engine purred, foot on the gas and they were off down the road in the three am quiet and dark. He would drive if it kept them safe, if it gave them distance from the ghosts and shadows that always seemed to be in their wake, but driving wouldn’t chase away their hunger. But driving wouldn’t take away the darkness that had grown and grown in Sam’s summer sun eyes and and Dean wasn’t sure what else he could do.  _

_ Corner of his eye, Sam turned sideways, pressed his back against the passenger door and drew his left leg up in the seat until he could hug his knee. He watched Dean with those eyes, watched him with that wide mouth just a little downturned at the corners like he’d forgotten how to really smile in the last week alone. Sam leaned back against the window with his head tipped and the long shadows in the dark played tricks there, hinted at finger band bruises around his little brothers throat that Dean knew weren’t really there.  _

_ “Dean?” _

_ The road curved hard, but they were in no hurry, surrounded by towering obsidian trees and coal dark leaves in the night that curled in toward the road, arched over it until he couldn’t see the late night sky in places. Flashes of fireflies if he looked hard enough, if he paused long enough to try and find them. Another life maybe, another them and they could have chased them, they could have had fireworks in a darkened field and fireflies in jars, he could have had Sam’s laughter and and Sam could have had his smiles. They could have had a childhood, they could have had a life, they could have been happy.  _

_ “Yeah, Sammy?” _

_ He would give anything for his little brother to be happy, would give anything for the love of his life to smile, for his baby to feel safe.  _

_ “I love you.” _

_ But Dean didn’t have a whole hell of a lot to give, scooped out hollow and overused empty for all that he tried, for all that he wanted. Sam gave him that faint bit of a smile in the darkness, and he spoke like it was something Dean should know, a fact of the matter that meant as much of everything to Sam as it did to Dean. He wanted to kiss that mouth as much as he wanted to just tuck his face against Sam’s throat and breathe for a moment, but Dean shot his little brother a smile instead.  _

_ “Love you too.” _

_ And he caught the way that Sam smiled back over the thin curve cap of his bent knee, and it was everything.  _

 

-

 

He had slept in the upstairs guest room that night, a whole level of the house between them, Sam asleep in his room with his books and his things and his dog while Dean had passed out as soon as his head had hit the bed. 

An early riser, perpetually even when he was tired, beaten into his bones from years of training and hunting and John, he had rolled off the bed before his eyes had even finished opening. The room had been empty though, no threat and nothing to see and Dean had been alone with his fluttering heart and his breathing. He had turned from the bed, scrubbing his hands over his face and squinting at the light of the rising sun in the window and only then had he given pause. 

Only then had he realized that the well tended garden that Sam had laid the both of them out in had been painstakingly crafted into an oversized Devils Trap. 

Only then had he recognized the off tinted symbol that Sam had painted on his ceiling to be just the same and Dean had felt his stomach plummet, his heart clench tight. He had pushed away from the window with a snarl, and the echo of his own curse had followed him to the bathroom to brush his teeth and empty his bladder. Quick and quiet down the stairs he had remembered from his childhood, and his foul mood had been impossible to keep when Sam blinked wide eyes at him from his seat on the kitchen counter, when Sam smiled at him from behind a mug of coffee, like seeing Dean had made his morning perfect. 

He would blame that breathless feeling on the fact that he had agreed to drive Sam to wherever it was he wanted to go when Bobby begged off to work out in the scrapyard, but Dean knew that he would never say no to anything that Sam wanted. 

Sam had seemed so eager though, so hopeful, and Dean had smiled at the way his little brother had carefully folded himself into the passenger seat of the impala. A raised hand and Rosie had stayed on the porch, and Dean had felt a little bit like he could cry watching the way that Sam’s longs legs had taken a moment of adjusting to fit so he didn’t rattle his knees against the dash. He had grown since the last time he had seen their first home, he had gotten longer, had gotten broader and Dean’s heartbeat had hinged on the way Sam’s fingertips had smoothed across the black leather between them. 

Bobby had given him directions, but Dean hadn’t stopped to think of just where his little love wanted him to go.

He’d driven by this church every time he ever went to the store for Bobby, off the main street and quiet and he had been able to  _ just _ see the steeple every time he went to get groceries. Now though, now it was different, he had parked in the smooth lot beside it and let the car idle for a minute. But the lot sat empty save for a single car and Sam watched him with those bright, hopeful eyes like he was worried Dean would tell him no, worried Dean would leave him the moment he got out. Like that would ever be an option, like Dean could ever even think to do such a thing.

“You wana take me to church, Sam?”

A soft tone, a playful tone, and Sam blinked those golden fox eyes at him. He nodded then, quick and sharp and Dean gave a bit of a laugh. He’d forgotten what it was like to have his brother in the car with him, had forgotten what it was like to have anybody with him, and suddenly, it didn't matter that Sam didn't say anything, because Sam was  _ there. _

“Then I think we gotta get outta the car.”

Eyes narrowed, mouth thin, Sam stared at him for a minute before kicking the door open with the sort of force and flare that Dean used to yell at him over. He only choked now, only laughed now even as he threw open his own door, only grinned even as the frame rattled. Because Sam slammed the door shut with the sort of force that spoke of memory, spoke of a kind of playful and petulant that Dean hadn’t had in a long, long time. 

Sam walked with purpose here though, turned so he could see Dean where he stood and waited there until Dean followed. He waited there until they could walk side by side, pressed shoulder to shoulder even with a parking lot of space around them. He half expected Sam to try and hold his hand, to lace their fingers together and lead him places that Dean would always follow. Instead he just gave Dean a smile, the kind he had never thought he would get to see again and Dean wanted to kiss that smile, wanted to taste how his little brother laughed.

Old brick, a little red tinged and dark, warm toned in the rising sun and it stretched up and up, a high arch on the entry and a green copper roofed, wide seated steeple positioned over what he assumed to be the sanctuary. Stained glass windows arched along the walls in emerald, in burgundy and there were no pictures there, just colored glass that stood three times as tall as he at least. The same green copper that capped the steeple made the rest of the roof and Dean would have paused in distraction had Sam not nudged him along around the side of the building to the steps. 

Up those, wide with curling rot iron bars on either side and the doors were just as large as the rest of it, a warm, dark wood with a curved top, a single door twice as wide as his arm span and fat handled. Sam pulled it open easy though, like he was used to the weight, like he did this often, and Dean had never been a very religious man but he hoped that Sam had found some sort of comfort here at least. 

For as looming as it was, the warm brick exterior hadn’t prepares him for the hush inside, for the elegance that he hadn’t expected to see in South Dakota. A small entryway, a room for coats and an open doorway that gave to a flight of stairs down where Dean couldn’t see and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to venture. It was clean, clean and comfortable like a well kept house, the floor a smooth stretch of marble tiles and the walls were a glossy kind of picture frame wood almost three feet high from the floor before paint took up the rest. 

Sam pulled him forward then, took him by his elbow and lead him to walk where Dean had faltered beneath the cross section of two glimmering, gold edged arches. 

A young man stood near the altar, the simple black habit and white collar marking him as a priest. He lifted his head when they grew near enough, and for all that his eyes seemed an impossible blue, he smiled. 

“Sam Singer! You’re early today, I didn’t expect to see you for at least another hour.”

And he was young, somewhere between Sam’s age and Dean’s, and he wondered for a minute just when he had started to consider himself old. But the priest smiled like he knew Sam, and he came away from the altar with something warm and welcoming about him, but Dean could hear violins in his head. But Dean could feel something swimming deep in his bones, a symphony kind of echo that he didn’t understand.

“And you brought a friend, must say I’m surprised to see you here without your father. Welcome to St. Mary’s, ...?”

He said it easily, said it casually like it was something everybody knew. Like Bobby  _ was _ their father, like their relationship with him was more than just a could have, should have, and it made something rattle in Dean’s chest. Marigold swayed within his lungs and curled around his ribs and it took him a minute to catch his breath, to not just stare at the side of Sam’s face.

“Dean.”

He nodded, bright eyes and an open face, and the holy man smiled at Dean like he deserved it.

“Well Dean, it's good to meet you. I’m Father Castiel, but I prefer it when my friends call me Cas. How about I show you around so Sam can pray?”

A suggestion, not an order, a genuine question given in a kind tone with the expectation of a genuine answer. He expected Dean to be honest with him, because people tended to be honest in houses of God, and Dean wasn’t sure what to make of that.

“I-”

Sam’s eyes were a little wide, a little hopeful, and he watched Dean with a quiet expression that he recognized. Six years hadn’t done anything to change the way his little brother looked when he wanted something without asking aloud, and Dean swallowed. Widened eyes and his lower lip pulled a bit between his teeth, he knew that face, he had never been able to say no to that face.

“Yeah, okay. I ain’t gonna leave, okay Sammy?”

Sam nodded, smiled, and at some point his hand had fallen to hold Dean’s because he squeezed his fingers then. Dean wasn’t sure who the touch was meant to reassure, but Sam let go of him with a lack of hesitation that meant he felt safe, and Dean knew better than to question that  He trusted Sam, had never really had it in him to question Sam even when he should have and the time that had separated them hadn’t done anything to change that behavior, Dean seemed just as quick to bend at a simple smile from that wide mouth. 

Bright eyes and loose shoulders and Sam turned from him, left Dean with Father Castiel to instead move on slow, sure feet toward the altar like he had been here before, like he had done this often. 

A gentle hand on his shoulder, firm but light and the priest watched him with a small smile, drew him aware from where Sam stood before the altar. 

“I don't believe I’ve ever seen you in our congregation before.” 

Like Dean had reason to be in a congregation of any kind, like he had any business in a church and he felt alien here. A foreign invader, who did he try and turn to defend Sam against when he himself stood as the stranger in this distant land. This was different than standing in Sam’s room, this was different than sitting in his little brothers carefully tended Devil’s Trap garden and watching Sam smile. 

This felt like a different kind of unwelcomed for all that Sam had smiled and drawn him in by the hand, and Dean wondered if it was just some cruel twist of fate that his little brother had found solace in a church that shared a name with their mother.

“No, I’m...I’m not from here. My work takes me all over.”

Hands behind his back, parade rest and comfortable there, Castiel made it seem all too easy to lead him down the aisle. Past the deep marble pedestal dish with its holy water depths that stood like a sentinel between the last two rows of pews, and the man's fingers trailed across the rim of it as they went. He had the same quiet peace about him that Sam had in his garden, and Dean tasted mint, smelled allspice and he watched Castiel as the priest lead him to a statue of Saint Mary, bathed in burgundy stained glass sunlight where she stood. 

Her head slightly bowed, her hands outstretched and her face sorrowful, the flicker of rows upon rows of votive candles gave an added warmth to the burgundy cast that the pristine white stone she had been carved from. 

“Well, any friend of Sam is always welcome here. He doesn’t bring company apart from his father, and Bobby has the bad habit of falling asleep in my pews.” A moment to refill the stack of long matched from a little cabinet beside the shelf that housed the candles. And then he smiled, white teeth and eyes narrowed by the press of his cheeks, he was friendlier than most priests Dean had ever come across. “And I think there's only so much prayer the Father will accept for Bobby Singer and his bad sleeping habits. The man snores with the mouth of a goat on the best of days.”

Like he meant it to be funny, like he tried to have a bit of a laugh, and Castiel tidied the long matches within their holding well. Hands in his pockets though, Dean wasn’t sure if he should laugh or not. Dean wasn't necessarily sure about much of anything at this point, nothing but the fact that there was distance between himself and Sam, he couldn’t feel Sam breathing next to him.

“Come, sit with me.”

Like the votive candles no longer needed him, like the statue of Saint Mary didn’t stare down at them with her whiteout eyes. Castiel lead him back to the aisle, back to the rows of warm wooden pews where they stretched on either side. Far enough back to give Sam his space, far enough back to let his little brother have room to breathe but Dean himself ached even as Castiel waved for him to sit. The pew creaked faintly under his weight and his hands curled into fists that he stuffed between his knees to try and hide. 

He could see the back of Sam’s head and his broad shoulders, the long of his back where he stood at the altar. As they sat there with just enough space between them, he watched as Sam’s head bowed. He watched as his little brother sank to his knees up there on the raised platform, as he made himself as small as his widened shoulders and long legs would allow before that gleaming marble altar. 

_ “Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum.” _

_ Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. _

Lower than he remembered, a little more full at the edges, a little longer, his voice had gotten older just like the rest of him for all that he had been dead, dead, dead in Dean’s head  That was his baby's voice speaking there, that was his Sammy talking. The first words Dean had really heard in six years, the first sounds of his little loves voice from something other than a phone, a voicemail. It was intrusive, Sam thought himself alone enough to speak and thus it was wrong, but Dean felt his breath catch in his lungs. 

Lilacs in his bloodstream because that was  _ Sam _ talking, that was  _ Sam _ saying something other than sobbing, other than pleading and apologizing. And it was Dean’s turn to cry then, and the flat of his palm fitted familiar between his teeth as he watched, as he listened. He had almost forgotten what Sam’s voice sounded like, the quiet reverence of it that had been missing in that voicemail, no amount of listening over and over would remind him how his little brother sounded.

No amount of punishing himself would teach him how to breathe again.

_ “Lord, thank you for looking out for Bobby, and having his heart scan come back positive. He’s a good man and he deserves to be happy and healthy, so thank you. Thank you for remembering him and thank you for taking care of him.” _

He shouldn’t listen to this, this was private, this was important but there were dodecatheon in his teeth, there were pink peonies in his eyes and Dean pressed the fat of his palm a bit tighter between his teeth. Sam felt safe here, Sam felt comfortable here, but he hadn’t heard Sam’s voice in so long that he couldn’t do much more than cry. Crisp, curling latin, words that Dean knew and a language that he knew like breathing, he had had to double down without Sam there, he had had to learn every word and turn of phrase. A jolt then, a start, because Sam didn’t know that, Sam didn’t know, Sam thought himself alone if not in company than in the words that he spoke and part of Dean burned for invading his privacy so. 

_ “You’ve done so much for him and I know that I have no right to ask anything of you, but please, allow me this if you never allow me anything else in my life.” _

Quiet voice, quiet words, but oh how Sam’s presence carried, seem to swell until the baby’s breath hush of him curled at the edges of the room, licked at the votive candles and the gilded sanctuary arches until his reverence touched everything. 

Until his sadness pulled at something instinctive and vengeful within Dean’s bones and he wanted to pull it from Sam’s lungs with his bare hands, wanted to take it just so his little love didn’t sound like that, didn’t feel like that. 

“He’s come here every wednesday morning for the last three years. I leave him to his prayer and give him his solitude, and never has his prayer changed. He prays for his father, and for his dog, and for the rest of the people in the world even though he can’t possibly know all of them. But this is new, he doesn’t pray like this.”

Castiel spoke beneath his breath beside him, privacy given in a whisper and yet Dean wanted to stand, and yet Dean wanted to leave. He wanted to take Sam by the forearms and pull him from this church and its quiet, take him from the glowing marble and the long rows of pews. Stuff him in the impala and drive, drive until they ran out of gas and Dean could just bury his hands in Sam’s hair and use his burning scent to chase the nicotine that lived in Dean’s lungs. 

“Why are you telling me this?”

He stared at the young priest instead, narrowed eyes and his voice muffled from behind the curl of his fingers. And Castiel smiled at him, gentle and welcoming in his priest’s habit and Dean wanted to hit him. All he seemed to know how to do was hurt though, make Sam cry, make Bobby look his age, get the other hunters around him killed. But a servant of God smiled at him like he deserved it, and Dean had never been good at dealing with people who tried to help. 

_ "Please love my brother as I love him, Father please forgive him for the things that he has yet to forgive himself. He isn’t a nice man, but he’s a good man with a good heart and he tries to help people. But nobody takes care of him, and he got hurt because...because I was scared." _

A low, pained sound in his chest, and Castiel was forgotten then, the presence of him where he sat beside Dean in the pew faded away. Dean stared at his little brother instead, head turned so quickly that his neck cracked even as his heart pulled tight. Face upturned, Dean could only assume that he stared at the sculpture of Christ on the cross where it hanged just below the sanctuary rose window. And Sam was bathed in brilliant amber light, skin made of gold and his hair red tinged from the spill of it, he was as perfect here as Dean had ever known him to be. 

And Sam prayed for  _ him _ .

“Because hunters you may be, but you and your brother are important to my Father’s work, Dean Winchester. You are meant for great things.”

The priest knew more than he should, knew more than Dean had shared, and the want was there again to take him by the throat and bash him against the pew. But Sam was there, Sam was  _ talking _ , and Dean could only be so torn before he wanted a cigarette, before he wanted to scream. 

But  _ Sam _ .

_ “I’m a monster and I know that, I know, and I shouldn’t love him like I do, but please. Please take care of my brother and let me love him while I can, because I think...I can feel something in my chest Lord, and I’m scared.” _


	5. Red Poppy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unedited, I just finished this and its 2 am, have at, im going to bed

“How about we go get somethin’ to eat?”

Sunlight in his eyes and Dean gave Sam his attention in the passenger seat, watched the way his little brother seemed more comfortable with how to settle his legs now. He leaned against the passenger door with his arm, with his weight, and he looked real here, and Dean wondered what it would have been like if this were them. Another life, another chance, maybe Sam wouldn’t have left the familiar confines of the impala, maybe they would still go on hunts, maybe they would  _ be _ . 

But Father Castiel had eyes that were too bright, too blue and he had smiled at Dean like an old friend. But the priest knew too much, knew the name he hadn’t given and he knew the profession that Dean didn’t share, and he had said it so calmly. The same sort of conversational candor to his voice when he told Dean they were important, when he left Dean alone to listen to his little brother on his knees in a church that part of Dean wished he had never stepped foot in. 

Sam had gotten to his feet just before noon though, but Dean’s eyes had gone dry by then and he had managed to pull himself together enough that Sam shouldn’t know. 

Six years between them and that should have taken the cryptophasia from their skin, but Sam turned those fox gold eyes to him and Dean knew better. 

There was no fooling his little brother when Sam knew him like that, there could be no hiding when Sam stood as the heart of him and thus held all of Dean’s secrets in his long fingers. He had that look on his face then though, and he stared at Dean with something that he didn’t want to put his finger on, something that he wasn’t sure he wanted to understand. Sometimes it was better to not know, sometimes it was better to not ask, Sam couldn’t turn away and leave when Dean hadn’t even started yet. 

But Sam looked at him with those eyes and that pull to his mouth where he leaned against the window like he knew something Dean didn’t, and Dean remembered being fifteen and feeling his whole world narrow down to the way Sam had stared at him just like that. 

“Don’t get smart with me.”

Sam smiled then, toothy grin and dimpled cheeks, sharp eyes narrowed by the press of it and Dean wanted to kiss that smile as much as he wanted to cuff the back of his head in the sort of smack Sam had all too readily hit him with yesterday. Because Sam looked cheeky, because Sam looked young for all that the both of them had grown and Dean needed to relearn this, Dean needed to figure out how to have more than just the ghost of his heart in the passenger seat. He had Sam now though, he had Sam laughing on a rattling wheeze that sounded more like the laughter he remembered and there were hibiscus in his lungs, in his veins. 

They threatened to clog his throat, but Dean slapped the impala into drive and took a chance, squealed around in the empty of the parking lot with a wide drift of the back end just on the off chance that he could make Sam laugh again. 

And he did, an older brothers kind of pride firing hot and fast in his bones when Sam braced one hand on the dash and another on the back of the bench, when the motion jerked his little brothers lanky, wide shouldered body against the door, when Sam’s wheezing laughter filled the car with a kind of sound that made it impossible not to grin. Sam’s eyes were bright and his smile was wide and he gave that expression freely now, more so than Dean had seen from him in a long time even before Stanford, before Louisiana. He pressed against the passenger door with a kind of weight brace motion as Dean screamed them through a series of fishtails that spoke of experience, muscle and bone memory if nothing else and it had been a while, but Dean still remembered spinning like a fool in snowy Midwest parking lots in the middle of the night and he wondered if Sam did too. Dean hoped he never stopped smiling like that, Dean hoped he never stopped laughing, because living and breathing and  _ happy _ was a perfect look on that beautiful face and they peeled out onto the quiet residential road on a sharp turn. 

Sam’s hands scrambled then, slipped from the dash and the back of the bench and Dean had a side crushed with little brother. No seatbelt across his wide shoulder and his abdomen and Sam slammed against him, one hand fisted in Dean’s shirt and the other crushed between them, his eyes were brilliant and wide. And Sam kept  _ laughing _ , that crackling, bellied wheeze of a sound that Dean had grown up hearing variants of as puberty pulled at Sam’s everything. 

The stop sign at the end of the block came upon them and Dean rolled the impala to a stop, and Sam hadn’t looked away, hadn’t moved from where the momentum had pressed them sun hot skin to sun hot skin and there was this look on his face that Dean didn’t know. Something to the upward pull of his mouth, something in the sunfire gleam of his eyes and Dean wanted to thread his fingers through Sam’s hair and smear their mouths together on a slow, slick slide. He wanted to kiss his little brother until his mouth tasted like Sam, and he wanted to keep Sam so close that the press of his fingertips left red heat burns across Dean’s skin.

“Seatbelt, Sammy. Police think they’re important people these days, ain’t gonna give em reason to pull us over unless we deserve it.”

Hibiscus and lilac, melianthus and violets and soon his lungs would grow as full as the now living field that had once been the graveyard of his heart. And soon he wouldn’t be able to breathe past the swaying meadow that had grown just beneath his skin, the roots that had twinned within his ribs and into his aching marrow. And Dean could think of no better death than loving Sam.

Sharp eyes and too long hair and Sam nodded, but his hands lingered against Dean’s chest, but he held there and paused for long enough that Dean nearly swallowed his nerves and kissed him. Sam moved away from him just in time though, the echo of heat where his hands had been and an aching, sharp lack of his weight against Dean’s side, his little brother scooted over to the passenger side of the bench, buckled himself in with a quiet sound from the belt as it slid. An ocean of space between them, and Sam  _ watched him, _ but Dean just swallowed and eased out onto the road.

He had never been one for talk, not even when they were younger, words had always seemed to come easier for Sam and his quick smile mouth, making people feel at ease had always been easier for Sam with his flicker beat laughter. Dean had never had it in him to be jealous, too busy being in love by the time he was old enough to understand what that shallow breathing crush feeling in his chest was and Sam had always, always smiled at him. Like he did now, head tipped a bit and the curl of it small but Dean knew his brothers smiles, most of them now where he used to know all of them and Sam made himself comfortable like that. 

Sam watched him as Dean navigated streets that he hadn’t crawled through in over six years, but he found  _ Etta’s _ after just one incident involving a wrong turn and Sam laughing at him from the passenger side. A few cars in the lot and what looked like a few people inside, and it was only then that he thought of Sam and what might be insecurities, only then that he realized that this might not have been the best idea. Because Sam would never be anything less than beautiful, but the scars upon his skin were just as horrific as they were heartbreaking and Dean never wanted to make Sam uncomfortable. 

“Maybe we sho-”

Little brother kind of impatience though and Sam threw open the passenger door like he was eager, like he was just as hungry as Dean himself. And it was with his feet on the ground and his hands braced on the roof of the car, on the lip of the door that Sam leaned over, tipped a bit at the waist and blinked at Dean. Barbed wire at his throat and a knife across his cheek but Sam wore his skin like he didn’t mind, like he had grown used to them, and maybe he had, and maybe that was enough. 

But Sam looked at him like that and he smelled rain for a moment, heavy wet earth and atmosphere and something cold, something curling. A radio static crackle in the back of his head and oh, but it smelled like Michigan when it rained, and he thought of sideways sunken buildings and floating walkways made of wood and a place he had never seen before South Dakota swam before him once again. Before Sam watched him with this quiet expectation and Dean unbuckled with a huff. 

“They still got good pie here?”

Disapproval over the top of the car, glossy black paint and a furrow to Sam’s brow, a purse to his mouth. Dean couldn’t help but grin as his door shut on a rattling slam, couldn’t help himself but Sam seemed so comfortable here, out in the open with his tortured skin and his sunfire eyes. He had never been very good at saying no, especially not when Sam rounded the hood like that and walked backwards for a moment, watched Dean to make sure he was coming. 

Sam’s legs were longer now, he moved a little bit faster and Dean hadn’t expected that, hadn’t been prepared to have to almost jog a bit just to catch up. 

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with havin’ pie for lunch, Sammy!”

Sam knew though, because Sam grinned, cheeky and wide and he turned on his heel when Dean was close enough, bumped their shoulders together where they walked side by side. He kept pressed close though, like he was worried still that Dean would leave, like if he didn’t see or touch him then Dean would slip away. He wanted to hold Sam’s hand, he wanted to curl in close to his brothers side and pull Sam against his chest, wanted to-

Dean pushed the door open with one hand, reached it just before, and he pulled Sam though with a lacing of their fingers and a tug at his little brothers palm. 

And Sam’s eyes were wide but he followed, trailed after Dean past the little sign that told them to seat themselves, and he held on tight. Mimicked the way that Dean had curled their fingers together with a clinging curve of their own and he was warm, infinitely warm. Nobody paid them any mind, not a single glance from the few elderly speckled throughout the diner and Dean took that at face value, pulled Sam into a booth in the corner and only then did he let go of Sam’s hand. Just so he could slide into the half of the booth with his back to the wall, just so he could feel it solid and sturdy against his back, and Sam had barely settled into the other side before Dean felt their legs tangle and hook together. 

And he smiled, smiled at Dean like Dean deserved it and fuck, he loved this boy, he had always loved this boy and he was probably going to die loving this boy. 

He looked forward to it.

“Afternoon boys, must say Sam, this one is much, much prettier than your father. You’ve got good taste, sweetheart.”

Black curls and dark brown eyes and she was old enough to be their grandmother if they had had one, but she spoke with a smile on her mouth and something familial and sweet in her voice. And though he looked at her, Dean could still see the way that Sam flushed, a sudden climb of blush across his cheeks and throat. And Sam  _ grinned _ , looked proud of himself for all that he had blushed, and his foot hooked a little further around Dean’s leg, pulled until Dean couldn’t tell which side of the table his feet were under. 

But Sam looked happy and Dean could never fault him for that, so he slumped a little in his seat and hooked his own foot around the back of Sam’s ankle. 

“Same thing, sweetheart?”

Sam nodded, an old hat at this, he’d been here more than Dean at this rate and it was good to see Sam comfortable, it was good to see Sam happy. The woman looked at him though, Grace by her name tag and Dean smiled, fought a bit of a startled laugh when Sam jostled his legs. 

“Whachu want, handsome?”

“Surprise me?”

A snort like she had expected that, a mutter of something under her breath that he didn’t quite catch and Grace swayed away from them with a shake of her head and a swing to her hips that spoke of children years past. Like she’d dealt with this before, and Dean wondered how many times Sam had come in with Bobby, wondered just how many times the elder hunter had given the exact same answer, if he had grinned like Dean had, if she had shaken her head the same. 

“Hear that, Sammy, she called me handsome.”

Fox sharp eyes rolled, Sam angled his face away and his shoulders shook with a quiet laugh, but he had a hand on the table like he’d been waiting, and Dean didn’t need to think about it. He reached across the needless space that stood between them and slipped his hand under Sam’s, laced together and their hands tipped sideways, little fingers down and their thumbs knocking against one another. His brother’s touch was warm, and yet his scars were pale, furious barbed wire teeth that had bound deep into his skin and Dean wanted to ask, he wanted to know. 

But Sam squeezed his fingers, held his hand like it was special, and Dean gave him a little bit of a grin. 

“What, I  _ am _ handsome, thank you very much.”

Liquid gold watched him from beneath sooty lashes and there were layers to Sam’s smile that Dean know neither the cause or name of. 

 

-

 

Bobby remembered enough to know that Dean couldn’t stay still once he’d settled somewhere. The man probably remembered rusted fenders eventually torn off with bare fingers and light bulbs shattered with booted feet, Dean’s bloodies hands and arms and the way his chest had heaved. Destruction of private property if not for the fact that Bobby was just going to crush what parts of the cars he couldn't sell for scrap anyway, and he’d given Dean direction when he was sixteen and angry, he’d given him tools and something to wrap his hands around. 

Three days into staying in the guest room with no sign of leaving and Bobby had told him to stop shadowing his brother and get to work.

Into the second week and Dean hadn’t even paused when Bobby had told him he was going to fix the ceiling fan in Dean’s room while he was down in the scrapyard. He’d just nodded over a cup of coffee and some bacon and eggs, Sam’s leg hooked with his and his little brother still chewing on a mouthful of chocolate chip waffles in the chair next to him. He’d ruffled Sam’s hair when he’d taken his plate to the sink, he’d let Rosie out into the yard and he’d gotten into the scrapyard before he’d even noticed.

Bobby had called it  _ his _ room, conversational, easy, like that room had always been Dean’s, like that room would always be Deans. And maybe Sam had gotten used to it, and maybe Sam knew what to do with that kind of feeling and that kind of ownership, but Dean hadn’t had a place so steady to lay his head and leave his things that he could call it his in as long as his brother was old. But twenty-four years was a long time, and Dean had startled to a stop on the way to the garage, had stared down at the work gloves he had just stuffed on his hands before turning to stare at the house. 

It hadn’t answered him or his questions, and he had been left to work them out himself, oversized crowbar caught in one fist and the handle for a tackle box filled with sockets and driver in the other. He’d woven through the scrapyard on heavy booted feet and Dean wondered just when he had found somewhere to rest his head that he didn’t pay for by the night, rattled by the fact that he had somewhere, he had people. It felt an awful lot like having a home, and he wasn’t even sure what that felt like anymore, cotton soft on his bones and scarlet geraniums at his fingertips. 

He wasn’t sure he deserved a home, nothing but a rotten vagabond down clean to his core and toxic to the touch, but Sam smiled at him and Bobby called him son and he wanted to be good enough for a home. 

Frustration was a familiar feeling though, steeped in a low grade curdle of rage and malicious intent, but there was direction to give to it now. No creature to shoot or beat or kill, nothing to bloody his hands on apart from the possible tetanus hazards that filled Singer Scrapyard. He used that bubble of feeling instead to tear at the hood of a quiet, unfortunate 60’s Dodge dart, managing to remove the metal entirely after some effort.  

There was oil across the block, gritty and as dried as it would get, dirty and sticky and Dean stared at it for a minute before sighing. A busted seal somewhere probably, maybe a nut that hadn’t been tightened down far enough when someone had tried to replace a line, but he could see a cracked radiator and a blown coil in the alternator even from where he stood. A minute to wonder how the thing had run, a moment to question how someone could even let their car get to this state before he pulled for a socket and driver and set to work on the alternator first.

Enough time passed that more parts lay strewn across the ground than in the engine cavity by the time he had to stop, sweat in his eyes and his shirt sticking to his skin. Wrench left against the interior lip, he kicked at the water pump until it got out of his way and Dean sidestepped the front of the car entirely. One hand caught in the back of the shirt and he used that hold to pull it over his head, ears catching a bit on the neck and the air got hot for a moment, the world got dark.

The cotton had been navy blue that morning, sticky black with sweat and Dean scrubbed it across his face to get the extra away from his eyes. He dropped it to the tool box then only to find the grease on his hands, only to find where he had smeared it across his chest rubbing at a line of sweat on his belly. 

“Fuck me.”

It would be better to do a restoration job on it rather than just to scrap it, the frame was still good and solid, most of the body panels still intact. He would need to tell Bobby, a chunk of change would need to be sank in to get the thing running again, but Dean had seen enough to know that she would be well worth it in the end. That would probably mean  _ he _ was going to rebuild it though, had watched Bobby silently complain about his hands just the other morning, but it was something to do, physical labor always made for the best kind of busy work. 

A glance back into the engine, and he could salvage some of those lines though the hoses were a complete bust and he would need new gromets at least, new gaskets more than likely. But it was hot, and he was the best sort of sore, slowly rotating his shoulders and stretching his arms and curling his spine a bit. A little lazy in the high sun, warmed to the bone and Dean sighed, braced a hand on the door of the car and smeared the other one across his face only to remember the grease on his fingers a moment too late. 

A crackle of sound from behind him and he lifted his head, hunters tension snapping back into his bones, he could kill something with that he had on hand, he could-

Sam stood a few feet away, a little flushed in the face and a little wild eyed, but it was just Sam, only Sam. And Dean gave a little smile, relaxed back against the car with a quiet huff, little brother had always been midnight silent on his feet even when he hadn’t tried. 

“Ain’t polite to sneak up on people, Sammy, taught you bet-”

_ “Dean _ .”

His voice seemed loud in the space between them, surrounded by towering cars and the scatter dust of rust in the air, but it was everything. The breath punched from his lungs, and the sound that came from his throat was wounded and low but Dean didn’t care, gripped the hood of the dart and blinked widened eyes. Because this was different from that first moment in the church, this was different than the times when Sam would take to his knees while Dean pretended not to hear, not to know, not to cry while his little brother thanked God and prayed for  _ him _ . 

It was different now, sunshine on his face and awareness in his eyes, Sam spoke to him, not God and Dean swallowed thick and heavy. 

“Sa-”

A hand on the back of his neck, solid touch and wide fingered because Sam touched what he wanted now, wasn’t hesitant with contact he wanted or his affection now for all that he had been silent up until that point and Dean lost his voice on a quiet, choking sound. But there was a hand on his skin where another hadn’t touched him in years, curling around the back of his neck and Dean shivered, felt the sweep of Sam’s thumb across his throat and he didn’t dare move. Not with Sam so close, not with Sam talking, touching him like Dean had ached for for years. 

A different kind of warmth where Sam crowded his space a bit, where Sam got close like he did when he wrapped both arms around Dean and swayed side to side. That hand skimmed down his spine, slow movement and solid pressure and spread fingertips as Sam touched every petal wide bloom of rose that trickled down his spine, anthesis across the knobs of bone. His fingers curled at the hood, spread fingers gripped just for something to hold and Sam traced two fingers across the widest blossom, touched the monochrome ink where it had been pressed into his skin. Lay the flat of his hand against the fat bloom of it where it sat low on the base of Dean’s spine, and his touch was a firebrand that Dean wanted to sink into. 

“These are for me, aren’t they?”

Gospel reverence in his voice, but his words were his own, the hesitance at the edges and the kind of hopeful that made Dean ache just to hear again. Sam touched him with the full of his hand and crowded into his space, and that hand curled around his side, caught at the cut of his hip. That was Sam’s breath on the back of his neck, that was Sam lighting a fire up his spine. That was  _ Sam _ , so close that Dean could feel his mouth against the shell of his ear, his voice lower than Dean remembered in a way that hadn’t faded without the filter of latin between them. 

“These are mine, these are meant for me, the- beauty, friendship, grace,  _ love _ , these are  _ mine _ .”

He was sweat sticky and dirty, but Sam’s hands held him tight, one at his hip and one across his stomach as he crowded Dean against the dart’s passenger side. And Sam’s voice was solid, only the faintest rasp at the start like he needed to find his footing, like he wasn’t sure of his own tone but he was steady, he was solid. He seemed incapable of stopping now that he’d started, mouth moving against Dean’s ear and his head had already started spinning at the feel of Sam’s hands on his bare, sensitive skin. 

Sam curved the hand on his stomach further until that entire arm came up across his chest, until he clutched at Dean’s heart like he wanted to feel where it beat within his chest. And it throbbed there, a frantic kind of pounding while Dean stared at what remained of the cool, deep blue that the car had been painted at one point in its life. While Sam’s fingers found more ink across Dean’s work hot skin, as they curved against his name where it had been painstakingly inked across the space he used to tuck Sam’s head, where his ribs guarded his wildflower bleeding heart. His breath was a punched wheeze, but Dean leaned into the touch, dizzy with it for all that it was only Sam’s hands upon him, but he wanted, he  _ wanted _ .

“I found your med kit. All that thread, yellow, all that yellow thread, and you just, the tulip,  _ Dean. _ ” Those words curled against his skull, and that mouth pressed against his throat just beneath the slope of his ear and there was no way to help himself. No stopping the way his head tipped to the side, exposing more of his throat or the way that a low whine sounded from his chest. Sam dragged his mouth across his skin though and he knew the wide pull of it from how Sam smiled, how he had always wanted to know how it felt, how it tasted. A rattle of a laugh against his throat, but Sam’s voice was rough, but his hands were heavy, but he never wanted his little brother to ever stop talking to him, touching him. “You think it’s hopeless? You should have made it red.”

Red tulips.

Declarations of love. 

To be a hunter had been carved into his very core for the last twenty-four years, and he felt it then. A rush of hard emotion from his chest, a wash of it in his blood, desire and a consuming kind of love and he used it then, bent his elbows and braced with his shoulders and pushed. Shoved off the passenger side of the dart, back against Sam’s chest with enough force that his hands knocked loose, that Dean could turn. That Dean could catch his too tall little brother by the back of his head, sling Sam around wendigo survival quick until he was against the car instead, pressed against the frame where Dean crowded in on him. Where Dean’s grease darkened hands caught the sharp of his jaw, the junction of his neck and shoulder, where he smeared dirty across Sam’s sun golden skin, where he curled his fingers and held tight. 

“Are you sure? Don’t fuck with me on this Samue-”

“I’ve loved you since I was ten years old, I was just scared you didn’t want me.”

Something broken in his voice, crackling around the edges, and Sam looked too sad and scared then, looked too lost and small then. But he loved Dean, had loved Dean, had loved him and had left him because he was scared, and Dean pressed until they were hip to hip, until the grease he had smeared against his front caught on the heather grey of Sam’s shirt. Until he felt Sam’s hands catch on his hips and grip tight, until he threatened to press bruises into Dean’s skin, dog roses sprouting where the fingertip shaped pointed of pain bloomed. 

He hoped it did, he wanted those bruises, wanted proof of Sam’s hands on him that he could carry for days. But he wanted to taste that wide mouth more, wanted to feel the way Sam curved against him when kissed and Dean used the hand on Sam’s throat to pull until his little brother’s mouth was against his. Hot to the touch, just as scalding as the rest of him and Sam moaned against his mouth, tipped his head into it and gave Dean his weight, held his hips with a kind of fierce ownership to his fingers even as he used that grip to pull Dean tighter against him. 

Sam’s tongue slicked against the seam of his lips and Dean chased it with his own, their breathing heavy and shared beneath the hot midday sun. His head spun but Sam was solid beneath his touch, Sam was real with his hands on Dean’s hips and his fingers low on his back, he was perfect and  _ his _ by the way that he leaned into Dean’s kisses and followed his tongue. His attention turned to Sam’s jaw then, his throat, and Dean trailed wet, biting kisses across sun loved skin. He felt the rumble of Sam’s moan before he heard it, the way that his little brother’s head fell back against the hood, as his hips arched up against Dean’s. But the angle was wrong, but there was just enough difference in their height that it wouldn’t do, it wouldn’t be enough. And the next sound that Sam made was one of disappointment, one of frustration for however quiet it was. That wouldn’t do, Sam should never be disappointed just as Sam should never be sad, Sam smiled like sunshine and tasted like a summer storm that Dean wanted to chase until he couldn’t breathe. He used his feet to push apart Sam’s own, quick pressure and his little love suddenly slumped against the dart’s passenger side, and those would indeed be bruises then, Sam’s fingernails sharp on his skin and his teeth caught on Sam’s throat in response. 

_ “Dean.” _

He could live for an eternity and never get used to the way Sam said his name, he could never die and still not managed to ever get over the way Sam’s hips rolled against his. A splash of electric pleasure in his veins, lightning along his skin where the desire fattened swell of Sam’s cock dragged against his own. Perfect, rapturous, devious, his little brother used the pressure tight hold on Dean’s hips to crush their abdomens further together even as Dean used his weight to pin Sam harder against the car. 

Hot metal and yet Sam didn’t seem to mind, dirty handprints on his perfect, scarred skin but the curve of his throat was beautiful beneath Dean’s mouth. But his eyes were sunfire burning beneath heavy lids and he pulled at Dean, demanded of him in a way that he wasn’t sure Sam had ever demanded of anything in his life. And he refused to disappoint, refused to fall short of what Sam wanted, what he deserved. 

“You’re so beautiful, do you know that?”

They panted against each others mouths, lips barely touching but the rut of their hips was sinful, was the thing that church hymns was made of and he licked from Sam’s tongue the way that his little brother moaned. Tasted Sam’s pleasure and his disbelief all at once and shifted his weight and set his feet and rocked his little brother against the car. 

“I will  _ always _ love you.”

His own voice was rough, gravel thick and dirty but he didn’t care. Sam seemed to crave it for how his nails bit into Dean’s skin, for how one hand dipped down beneath the band of his sweat damp jeans and used a handful of flesh to grind Dean against him harder. He kissed at Sam’s gaping, moaning mouth and chased the sound of his own name off of that sharp tongue as Sam used the door of the dart to thrust back against him. 

“De-Dean!”

“I’m here, I’m here.”


	6. Dodecatheon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh, so hi! it's been a while? But I'm in the midst of moving, and getting my life back together and had a moment to sit down and thought I would finish this! So, here you go, un edited, have fun?

He’d gotten used to being barefoot faster than he’d gotten used to Sammy talking. 

Almost two months in and he still got hung up on that wide, wicked mouth and the sound of Sam’s voice. Because some part of him still expected Sam to have the high and fast he’d had when their lives were nothing but motel rooms and bullet wounds and jumping when John told them too just to avoid a heavy hand. Because part of him thought that some things would never change, and he half expected to blink awake in some nowhere cigarette stained dive with ashes on his tongue and a dead little brothers name on his ribs. Because this didn’t happen to people like him, bad men didn’t get to smile and feel like they could breathe again, he didn’t understand-

“Hey.”

His voice was lower now, but it was softer too in a way that Dean had never expected before, but his heart still beat to the tune that Sam set. He blinked when the younger snapped long, scared fingers at him and the sunlit sweet of the backyard swung into focus once more. The shadows from the trees hadn’t moved, the grass beneath his bare toes still felt warm, and Dean shuffled a little where he stood, so caught up and dizzy with the sheer fact that he had Sam that he’d forgotten what exactly he was supposed to be doing. 

“What?”

“You gone sun stupid?”

A slow curl grin and a soft affection to his voice and damn it but Dean couldn’t help the way he grinned back. 

Just when he thought he couldn’t fall any more in love. 

And then Sam made some sharped tongued remark, less tentative with every day that passed and more like the just a touch too honest little brother that he’d missed like breathing. Sam would take to his knees and bow his head and speak quiet words that Dean shouldn’t have listened to, all while the elder kept a sharp, critical eye on the priest who knew too much and came over for dinner every Saturday. And then Sam would watch him with those sharp, sunfire eyes and pull Dean against him when Bobby wasn’t around and he would get lost in a mouth he had never thought he would get the chance to taste. 

“Thought college boys were supposed to be polite.”

His nose wrinkled, the same sort of pull that Dean had always wanted to kiss, and while he could now, he didn’t have the chance. Because Sam huffed a laugh and ducked low, a large bag pulled up into his arms like it didn’t weigh much at all. But Dean knew better, watched the pull of muscle of his little brothers biceps beneath his short sleeved shirt, watched the way his scarred skin danced beneath the sun. 

“And I thought hunters were supposed to be smart, but we can’t have everything. Catch.”

He used the shrug of his wide shoulders to toss the oversized bag at Dean, and though he caught it with ease, it sagged heavy and swift in his hands, contorted in on itself like it wanted to drip straight out of his hold. Swearing quietly under his breath, brow furrowing, he lost sight of Sam then as he tried to get a steady hold, little brother’s laughter ringing in his ears. It swam through his lungs and pulled at the grave dirt between his ribs where rose of Sharon and lucerne had planted their roots and begun to grow in delicate furls. 

It was a better sound to be had here, here in the sunlight and the late summer air that had started to take a chill in the mornings, better alive with the arching crackle of age that the echoes in his dreams had never gotten quite right, Sam’s laughter was perfect where it etched out a brand with the burn of his love along Dean’s bones. He ached to kiss that mouth and to slip his hands along Sam’s back, to trace the scars that he knew dipped below the waist of his brother’s faded jeans. Neither of them seemed to be in any rush though, neither had initiated anything beyond Sam pulling at his shirt, Dean ruching his up past those broad shoulders. They rutted like the teenages they hadn’t ever been allowed to be, against the wall or a bed when given even a moment to themselves, but Sam hadn’t tried, and Dean wouldn’t press. 

“Throwin’ shit, I’m out here with no shoes on, don’t know what you’re tossin’ at me.” 

A heave, a test of the weight and the seams of the sack and he hefted the bag high up onto his shoulder. It did its best to try to slip off on either side, hung low across his bone and Dean shrugged once to try and adjust his hold. All to no avail, the bag slipped how it wanted and felt ready to slide free entirely, and Dean straightened in time to catch the grin on Sam’s wide, perfect mouth. 

“What?”

Arms loose across his chest and his body angled, Sam looked long and lithe in the doorway where he leaned, looked just as domestic as he did delicate in the half shadow embrace within the shed. Bare feet on the lip just where he nearly tipped into the grass, head rested against the jamb and his summer sun eyes were soft, his smile the sickly sort of sweet that dripped with peach blossoms and water lilies that Dean wanted to taste. Because Sam smiled at him with that soft, that sweet, and Dean had never known a sight any better. 

“I love you.”

And that smile was the thing of symphonies, laced with three simple words that plucked the beat clean from his heart every single time. There was Heaven to be found within such a little phrase, surely the only one that Dean would ever know and Sam gave him both that arching forgiveness and the quiet possession all in a languid curl of his tongue. And just as he wasn’t sure that he had ever known a love like this, Dean had never felt owned before, not like this, but he leaned into the burning of it happily. He would wear those chains if Sam held the other end, he would let himself be lead wherever Sam wanted him to go, just so long as Sam kept smiling, Sam kept talking. Just so long as Sam kept loving him like he actually deserved it.

He could lie to himself then, he could talk himself blue in the face and pretend he believed that he deserved that smile, those touches, that love. 

If he lied to himself enough, maybe he would be able to lie to Sam too, maybe Sam would never second guess, maybe Sam would never leave. 

But there was a burning in his heart and there was a low tidal broiling in his blood and he couldn’t help the way he smiled back. He smiled back like he didn’t deserve, he smiled back like he didn’t have the right, but it sent a splash of color something warm and gentle across Sam’s ruddy tanned cheeks and the turn of his nose. He wanted to kiss that blush, he wanted to encourage that beautiful, delicate, aching show of life, but there was distance between them and his hands were full. 

“Love you, Sammy.”

He wanted a cigarette. 

Cool, hard nicotine within his lungs and the hold of the paper between his teeth, the flicker flame burn of the cherry where it swayed and glowed at the tip. He wanted a cigarette and something to do with his hands, terrified of that perfect smile and those gilded eyes and the damages he could do if he wasn’t careful. He ruined lives with these hands, he tore things asunder with a pull of his shoulder and the squeeze of a trigger, and yet Sam gave him flowers like he knew how to handle them, Sam gave him the trauma gnarled pulse of his heart like Dean knew how to be gentle. 

Sam knew, he must have known, he had watched Dean with those eyes since he had first come into that kitchen. And the things that he had said since that moment in the scrapyard, the watchful corpses of over a hundred desolate cars with their rotting frames standing watch as Sam spat out his first real words in years across Dean’s skin. Words that he had yet to stop speaking, a bottled up faucet that Dean couldn’t begin to try and find the knob for. As if he would ever want to, as if he would ever dare, but even Bobby looked overwhelmed at times by the sheer amount that came from Sam’s mouth, the boy only ever really any kind of quiet when his fingers were buried in the dirt.

He’d gotten used to the lingering drag of silence after so many years of it that the sounds of a voice other than his own sometimes jostled him still. 

John had never talked much, had always insisted they drive separate, and Dean had been left with himself and his cassettes, his own mouth and his own words and his own lackluster humor that he had never found terribly funny. There had only been so much that he could fill the silence before he had just let the quiet settle instead, and it had seeped into his bones, had left its mark along his skin to rent a space between the ink that he had placed there. And he had grown comfortable with it, comfortable in the skin he had stained with his blood and painted with his love and his regrets, but Sam smiled at him and he wanted to give him his bones, but Sam talked to him and he wanted to give him his heart. 

He just hadn’t worked out yet how to hand over something that Sam already had. 

“The hell is in this bag?”

He couldn’t take that expression, he couldn’t take that face, not when there was screaming in his sleep every night and a postmortem chill in the fingers that seeped down his throat in his sleep. So Dean blinked and he watched the way that Sam’s smile turned a little sharp at the corner, turned impish and proud as his little love pushed himself off the shed stoop and into the grass. 

“Sand. You’re gonna help me dig up my bulbs for the winter.”

There must have been something funny to the expression on his face, something about the way his mouth pulled or his brow furrowed because Sam laughed as he drew nearer. He laughed and laughed and laughed, and he drew a hand across Dean’s shoulder and chest as he passed. 

“Be happy I’m not making you help me put down manure this year. Rosie likes to eat it.”

At the sound of her name, the dog perked up from where she had stretched out on the back porch in the shade, all long lines and sleek red fur, liquid brown eyes that blinked at the two men where they stood. She followed a little less closely at Sam’s heels more and more with each week, very rarely out of sight for all that Dean generally managed now to be the closest breathing thing at Sam’s side. 

Her tail gave a lazy wag, whip thin and long, loaded with the kind of sharp impact that had left red lashes against his thigh if he stood too close. But Rosie’s didn’t move, just wriggled a little further onto her belly as they passed and rested her head on her paws to watch them. He wanted to scratch at her ears, pull his nails across that spot just at the base of them that she could never seem to reach, but it was either pet her or keep up with Sam and he was fearful to ever be left behind. 

He didn’t have to go far, around the side of the house where it stood bathed in the thick shade of the towering elm and oak trees. Long, lush leaved branches swayed in the still warm breeze and sent thick shadows dancing across the ground, this side of the house rarely saw sunlight, what little skimmed across in the morning the trees made quick work to diffuse. And so the shadows were long, hanging and cool in the gentle dim they set across everything they touched. 

Sam sat in the grass beneath that enveloping shade, amidst curling ferns and astilbes and dark, lush hostas that seemed to nearly lean into him. Perhaps if Dean held his breath than he would see the way that they swayed, if he stopped the throbbing of his heart he would witness the way that the rest of the world bent in devotion toward his brother just as he himself did. But Sam was consuming like that, Sam was a wildfire burning that he couldn’t hold his breath and count his fingers and try to wait on, he would get swallowed whole or left behind in nothing more than a billow of swirling, sweeping ash. 

He dropped the sack instead, watched with a furrowed brow as it stayed nearly upright all on its own exactly where it had fallen. 

“Why do you need  _ sand _ ?”

Quick fingers fished in his back pocket for a familiar box and the lid came up easy, a single cigarette caught between his thumb and forefinger. Fat metal lighter in the other hand and a quick pull of his thumb, the end of the cigarette burst to life in a flicker of flame before it settled into a steady, vibrant  cherry glow. A long draw, hand nearly clasped entirely over his jaw and he held his breath with it, felt the nicotine trendles coil sharp and sweet within his lungs. He held it until his head started to swim, vision sifting and his chest achingly tight, it was only fitting then that he stared down at Sam, Sam with his eyes and his love and Dean’s heart in his hands held so tight that he didn’t need a cigarette to feel this way.

Smoke billowed out from the thin spaces between his fingers on the exhale, a curling gust of it that swarmed their vision until the only thing he could see was the brilliant, ethereal glow of Sam’s trapped sun eyes while his little love blinked.

Sam didn’t give him a single reproachful word for it, just blinked at Dean even after the breeze cleared away the second hand haze. And there was something slow and knowing about his smile, that same one that Dean remembered watching come alive over bent knee caps and from behind crossed arms and it had been years since he had seen that particular sharp, almost calculated lift. 

“Some of my bulbs won't make it through the first frost. Too tender, so we need to take them up and dry them for a few weeks so we can pack them in sand for the winter.”

He wanted to kiss that smile.

That curling, coy, perfect smile.

“These ain’t dried if I gada dig em up, baby boy. So why’d I carry the fifty pound bag of sand over.”

Another pull from his cigarette and oh, oh but Sam’s smile was candy apple sticky and midnight passion dark, smug at the corners and self assured in the center curve.

“Because I like watching you carry things.”

And Dean sputtered on the smoke in his lungs, bursts of it blossoming from between his chapped lips as he struggled with a laugh. He wanted to lick that smile, wanted to smear it with his own lips just to get another taste, just to get another breath. He wanted to do a whole hell of a lot of things, but Sam’s skin was clean for all that it had been carved into and scarred and Dean didn’t want to sully that candle flicker beauty with the grave dust and dead man's blood that made his skin.

He sat in the soft, encompassing shade instead, legs half bent and curled until he could rest his chin on the cap of one. Until he could watch Sam over the bend of one of the legs that had run him ragged and aching his entire life, and his little brother was beautiful for all that he teased. So Dean watched him, tender in his gaze and covetous in his heart while Sam sank loving fingers into the dirt to pull at bulbs he deemed too young.

They hadn’t managed to sprout yet, dark leathery skin that had barely crackled and soil clung to each one that Sam pulled free. He took a plastic bag from his pocket, crumpled and thin and it crinkled quietly when he spread it out, it tried to stick a little to his fingers for all that it couldn’t quite seem to hold, and he handed the bag to Dean. Expectant, not a glance given in the elders direction and Dean caught it in calloused fingers before it could be caught by the breeze. Held open by the handles, Sam dropped in the four bulbs he had already pulled free with little fanfare even as Dean peered at each one of them, fat, hairy looking bulbs the size of his fist with coiling little finger like tentacles that had burst from the top. 

They looked more like something that belonged in a cheap horror film rather than in his little brother’s hands.

“Fuck are these?”

They looked like little demons, looked like little monsters and his incredulousness must have shown in his voice. Because Sam smiled, a laugh of a stretch for all that he didn’t take his attention off his work and damn, but his little brother was perfect with that smile and that faint roll of his eyes that Dean recognized even from here. But Sam handed him another one, just as strange as the first few had been though this one he tossed at Dean, this one he expected to be caught. And to hell with his reflexes, but he caught it bare handed without a hint of hesitation and what he had thought to be hair were instead thick fibers that spun every which way around the fat bulb.

“Tuberous begonia’s, apricot lace.”

“The rose ones?”

Sam’s head lifted then, just a bit, just enough, and he stared at Dean with something a little wide in his eyes, something a little startled. A little stricken even and oh but how the thought soured something acid quick in his belly, how it made him want to lurch forward and touch at Sam just to soothe him, just to reassure him. Sam smiled though, slow and trembling and beautiful and Dean felt like he could breathe again, because Sam still looked startled for all that he seemed infinitely pleased with something that Dean didn’t understand. But he didn’t need to understand anything when Sam smiled like that, he didn’t need to know anything when Sam looked at him like that, because he knew Sam, and Sam was the only thing that had ever mattered. 

“Yeah, the little rose ones. Where did you learn that?”

A shy tilt to his voice as if Dean didn’t know the taste of his mouth, as if Dean didn’t know the way he shook when he came, but Sam was bashful here with his flowers just like he had been with that curl of verbena in Carthage all those years ago and Dean wanted to kiss him. He wanted to brush his lips across the white camellia’s that had flowered from within his cedar bones, Sam would never know just how beautiful he was. And he knew the things that had made his little love so unsure of himself and it fed at that ever present blister of rage that had made a home for itself in his blood. 

He took another drag and watched the cherry tip come alive, watched the way Sam stared at him with those sharp summer shine eyes and that upturned nose. And it was the smoke surely, a shift catch from the haze of it all when he exhaled, when it climbed out in a greedy, roiling wave from between his chapped lips, but he could have sworn that there was a drip of glittering gold off of a single hinge to Sam’s jaw. 

“Books. Old women who gave me the time of day, a couple old men.”

And Sam blinked at him, blinked those fox sharp eyes like he didn’t understand, or maybe like he couldn’t quite believe and Dean wanted to touch at the corners of his lips and his eyes until he stopped looking so overwhelmed. 

_ “Why?” _

A scoff, and the inhale that he had just started to take from his cigarette instead turned into words spoken around a mouthful of smoke, so desperate to make Sam understand that he didn’t give a damn about manners. 

“Because you’re made of flowers, Sammy. If I couldn’t love you then I was going to love them instead.”

Sam looked an awful lot like he wanted to hit him then, but Dean didn’t care, not when his sunfire eyes turned glossy and bright like that. Sam’s mouth trembled even as it went wide and flat and his little brother stared at him like Dean was the one who held hearts in his hands, like Dean somehow had any power here. Razor sharp brain of his, Sam should have known better, he should have realized by now that Dean had always been weak, had always been struck down and bound and willing just for the possibility of a laugh, a smile from his little brother. 

“You shouldn’t say those thi-”

“Why the hell not? You’re perfect, and you’ve got this heart that wants to care for everybody despite anything they’ve done. You’re a genuinely good person, and you smile like the fucking sun, and I’m allowed to say this shit if I damn well please, you know why?” His breath tasted like smoke, he could feel it in his lungs, in his blood, but Sam stared him in the face and didn’t flinch from the wash of aggression that had taken refuge for itself on his skin and within his marrow. “Because I love you, and loving you  _ hurts _ , and I wouldn’t trade it for a single fucking thing.”

Delicate was the blush that stole across Sam’s cheeks and nose, a sudden spindle spread of color that lay bright against the sun loved warm of the rest of his skin. And Sam watched him even through it, head still lifted from where he had snapped to attention at Dean’s tone, eyes still focused and bright and God, but it was heady to have that gaze on him, it did things to the low thrum of arousal that ate at his insides to have Sam’s focus on him. 

“I love you.”

Sam said it like the convictions he gave on his knees, with his head bowed and latin rich and full on his lips. He said it like the prayers that Dean heard him whisper under his breath when he thought he was alone, the exorcism that he mouthed to himself every morning when he stirred his coffee that Dean didn’t want to think about. But Sam smiled now, watched him with the same focus like he watched the crucified glory of Christ on the cross and Dean wanted to kiss him just to get him to stop. 

Dean dropped the bulb into the plastic grocery sack instead before shaking the bag at him.

“Got more tentacle babies to give me, or is this it?”

He couldn’t help the little smile he gave around his cigarette, filter clamped between his teeth from where he’d tucked it into the corner of his mouth. And Sam’s nose curled when he grinned like that, but his dirt dark fingers skimmed over the top of the flowerbed like he looked for something, like he searched for all that didn’t delve beneath the surface. And then his hand paused, and Dean watched as those dirty fingers sank into the dirt with the precision that came from practice. A swift twist of his wrist and a careful pull and Sam clutched another ugly, demonic looking bulb in his dirty, dirty hand. 

A squawk as it hit his chest, hands too occupied holding the bag to be able to catch it in time and the fat bulb rolled down to his lap instead. He swore, dropping the bag even as Sam laughed, wide mouthed and wild. Dirt across the front of him, along the folds of his shirt and his bare feet slipped in the cool grass as he caught it with both hands to stuff it down in the sack. 

“God damn it Sa-”

Cold fingers clasped around his ankle, tight and purposeful and Dean couldn’t begin to look down to that hand before Sam pulled. Before Sam yanked on him, took his leg out from under him with the kind of force that Dean had never known him to have. It spoke of things that he wasn’t certain he wanted to know, but the world swung around with it and the grass was cool beneath his head. 

But Sam’s fingers were sharp at his ankle, demanding against the bones where they nearly ground together and he pulled and pulled until Dean was forced swiftly across the grass. Until his foot had nearly landed in Sam’s lap and he didn’t need to lift his head to know just what Sam had found, he didn’t need to even look to know the look on his little brothers face. So he stared at the swaying trees above them instead even as his heart raced, even as his throat felt tight. 

Stitched about his ankles in delicate sweeps of ink, tiny cypress leaves that bit into his skin with the permanent hold of graveyard rot iron and they held at his bones with the eternal, cold promise of the long forgotten fingers of the dead. And Sam had found them, and Sam knew just what those little leaves were and the things that they must have meant. 

“Why do you have these?”

His voice wasn’t as burnt up as Dean had thought it would be, not as choked up and coiled wet and he would take it if it meant his little brother didn’t cry. There would be bruises on his ankle, there would be a brand from Sam’s love for him to carry on his skin as the last of his shame and desperation and regret were found. He welcomed those bruises, he welcomed that pain, but Sam trembled with a needle point shake that he couldn’t even begin to sooth when he lay like this. 

“Sammy.”

_ “Why do you have these?” _

Steely, a ferocious demanding and a biting refusal to be denied, oh but he was a Winchester for all that he called himself otherwise now. He had the same quicksilver spine and diamond glass grit and Dean wanted to bruise their mouths together until he could taste that anger. But Sam had other ideas, Sam had answers that he wanted to be given with a tone that Dean remembered from sixteen year old begging and eighteen year old screaming.

Sam had cypress leaves on his lips and in his lungs just as much as Dean had them on his ankles and in his soul, a cry of despair for a footfall of death.

“You were dead, Sam.”

A low sound from somewhere in his chest like Sam wanted to cut him off, like Sam wanted to say something. His cigarette had fallen into the grass, snuffed out from the impact with a thin coil of smoke from where the cherry had burned previously. 

“Suiciders don’t go to Heaven, and I don’t care much for God, but you do. I remember those weeks at Blue Earth and how how happy you were, and...and I hated myself. I hated myself, Sammy, and I woke up every day wanting to die. But I couldn’t get rid of my only chance of ever seeing you again, so I gave myself the only death I could.”

It was consumingly, eerily silent then for a long few beats of his heart as Sam didn’t say anything, and he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe, he cou-

Upright suddenly and there were glimmering, cracklings fingers of lightning in the corner of his vision. He could taste the ozone bright of it, he could see the golden burst traces of it across Sam’s skin as his little brother reached out those dirty, dirty fingers for a fistful of his shirt. Sam took hold of him where he hadn’t already, and Dean didn’t have time to dwell on just what had forced him upright if it hadn’t been Sam because it was with those hold points on both his chest and his ankle that he was physically forced into his little brothers lap. A breeze that he couldn’t feel pulled at Sam’s clothes, his hair, and there lay a slashed crown of scars across his brothers forehead, his temples, marks that Dean hadn’t seen previously.

There was a seismic ocean roaring symphony under his skin, too deep horns and words that he didn’t understand and Dean could feel static on his skin.

His knee twisted a little, his hip pulled, but his hands caught on wide shoulders where the younger had pulled him to straddle his thighs. But his body moved all too readily to the demanding pull of Sam’s hands and it would have been a glorious feel had he not been caught up in the electric solar flare of Sam’s eyes. For his expression was furious, and he gripped the back of Dean’s head with a single hand, forced his body to bend until their mouths caught together in a smear that tasted of hemlock and something sugar crystal sweet, that burned of a possessive, undeniable ownership. 

_ “You don’t get to die without me.” _

 

-

 

_ They’d come into Newport by way of San Jose a state back along interstate 101, a relatively close shot from where they’d been in Visalia near Sequoia National Park. It promised had promised to be a long drive, John hadn’t said a single word about them stopping and had simply told them not to get lost and he’d taken off in a roar of diesel. And Dean had done his best to keep his eyes on the road, to not get swallowed up and left behind in the San Francisco traffic, but it had been impossible to ignore the way his little brother’s eyes had light up at the golden roofed buildings and the high campus bell tower in Palo Alto.  _

_ Sam hadn’t said anything about it though, had just stared at the buildings they passed and the cars huddled around them in the crawl of traffic while Dean had done his best to keep as close to John as he possibly could.  _

_ It had taken them four hours to get clear of San Francisco, the sun had begun to set and a spontaneous lull in traffic had come upon them like a blessing. A nearly full tank of gas and it had been easy then to tail John like he needed to, stay as close as he could on the curling amble of the interstate where it cut along the coast of California northbound. The rain had set in around midnight, the barely six hours into their journey and it had hung around, heavy and persistent for the remainder of the ride.  _

_ But Sam had just turned the radio up and stayed wide awake beside him, buzzing with a kind of something that Dean couldn’t even begin to understand. But there was something bright in his firelight eyes, but there was a smile on his perfect mouth, but Sam looked happy then next to him in the black satin finish confines of their home. But Sam looked the happiest that Dean had seen him in months, but Sam had food in his belly and a smile on his face that had stuck around for days on end and Dean would take anything he could get.  _

_ His little brother had sung along to David Bowie telling them to just dance with a grin on his face that even the rain couldn’t combat, and John had let them stop long enough at a gas station five hours before to refuel that Sam had been able to scramble in and get them food. Full bellies and music in their lungs and Dean had felt alive, had felt achingly, deliriously in love with the beautiful boy next to him and everything had been right in his world, he had been able to pretend then that everything was perfect and simple and small. _

_ But that had been six am, and it had gone on ten about fifteen minutes past and nothing was ever simple.  _

_ John had left them at a church of all places while he went off with the priest to inspect a lead, a friend of Pastor Jim’s from what Dean had been able to figure out, but two hours had come and gone and his throat felt achingly tight. Because that was his little brother with this burning light from a clandestine yearning caught in his eyes and Dean could almost feel the itch on Sam’s skin to trace his fingertips across the delicate caving of Christ’s bleeding feet.  _

_ The back of his throat burned, and he felt the faint, distinct urge to vomit.  _

_ Something oil slick and steaming on the back of his tongue, it had always been this way, every single church set this same bitter, nauseous, nearly pained feeling in his throat, his chest. He had hoped to convince Sam down the the boardwalk, see what games they could cheat out of a few coins, a few prizes, anything to get some sunshine in the hopes that the rain would let up.  _

_ But it hadn’t, and it wouldn’t, Father Graves had given him this slow, sympathetic smile that Dean hadn’t liked in the slightest when he’d asked about it, told him that it was liable to rain the rest of the week. Had welcomed them to Oregon and left with John, left Dean alone with a little brother with eyes too wide on the quiet glimmer of a warm wooden church and the cloying, thick smell of frankincense smoke that filled the space around them.  _

_ He’d taken a seat, thrown himself into one of the long wooden pews with its thin burgundy cushion and he had watched Sam instead. Watched the way thin fingers traced across the marble edge of the altar, they had healed well from where they had broken, bones snapped by a vengeful spirit that had gotten too crafty with its environment. Sam hadn’t even screamed, not when they snapped and not when Dean bound them, and his little brother had just blinked pain bright eyes at him with an expression that he hated. But he traced those fingertips now across things that they shouldn’t touch, careful carving for the altar where detail had been etched lovingly, delicate wooden details laid into lace thin wooden arches and the entire thing reeked of a kind of care and patience that Dean would never understand having for a building of all things. A fleeting kind of greed, of occupancy, pride, he watched these people with their churches and their holy water anointment and their gluttonous self righteousness as they toiled away their lives and lied on their knees, he would never understand why they gave themselves to something that they didn’t know, that they couldn’t see.  _

_ He would never know how to turn his gaze to the supposed glory of a carving of Christ and love it like he loved Sam, and he would never have the need.  _

_ Sam touched the altar like he was supposed to, like John hadn’t told them not to break anything, but didn’t the man know better? They were Winchesters who did what they wanted and expected the world to fall in line, such were the things that they had been taught, principles that stood as replacements to the tenants that a good man should have given them. But didn’t John know better? Because half of the personal army he had tried to build was dirty in everything he touched, for Dean himself had been sullied and ruined for the things that he had been made to do in desperation. But Sam would never know hunger for more than two days if he could help it, but Sam would never go without dry clothes and a bed, but Dean would damn himself however much was necessary for his little brother to be safe and smile.  _

_ Sam touched the altar like Dean would never dare, and Sam seemed to breathe in here with an ease that Dean had never known. A spectre made of sacred holy fire, his little brother swayed on slow feet around the altar, took in the opulence of the church with the bated breathed awe that Dean nearly envied him. Because Sam looked at the world like he loved it, like he loved the things he saw with the same aching fervor that Dean loved him with, his little brother was too good for his own safety.  _

_ “What woods it made of?” _

_ Even with the distance between them he could see the flush of color on Sam’s face, the shy little smile on his face. But he didn’t hesitate like he used to, he didn’t horde his hopes and his knowledge like he had nearly done in Carthage and instead he gave his smiles to Dean like Dean deserved them.  _

_ Palm flat on the altar then, he stared down at it like he needed to, but Dean knew better. Had watched those fingertips tracing dark wood veins and he knew that Sam knew, but Sam touched the wood like he still needed to, or maybe like he wanted to instead.  _

_ “Magnolia. They didn’t stain it.” _

_ “Uh huh, and what’s magnolia?” _

_ A bittersweet smile on the side of Sam’s face, Dean could only see half of it but he knew that pull. He knew that crinkle to those sharp eyes and he knew the wrinkle of that nose and Sam drew the flat of his palm across the top of the altar. He left his claim behind in the streaks of his skin against polished wood, and some small part of Dean hoped they never got cleaned away, hope some trace of them remained forever in this place where Sam looked happy for all that he himself could barely breathe.  _

_ “Perseverance, dignity.” A pause, and his lips pursed. A pause and his cheeks puffed a bit and Sam’s head turned then. Turned to stare up at that hanging carving of Christ once more where he hung behind the altar and Dean couldn’t see his face but he could guess, Dean couldn’t see his eyes but he knew that tone of voice. “Nobility.” _

_ That altar stood between them now, held Sam closer to the statue of Christ on the cross than it did Dean where he had splayed on the pew. Steady and demanding like it had the right the right to put something between him and the hands that held his heart, but Sam leaned back against it and braced his palms on the altar, trusted it with his weight so he could turn his face up to Christ and the light that spilled in from behind him.  _

_ His back to Dean and he looked noble himself then, shoulders that had just begun to widen appropriately and a growth spurt that had finally set in. He could press his face to Dean’s throat now without having to stretch when a fever made him delirious and scared, and his fingers had grown long and more elegant than their lifestyle granted. He looked noble and he looked ever holy, golden streaming sunlight that had turned his hair to bronze, and Dean didn’t need to see his face to know the expression that had taken his fox eyes and his wide mouth. _

_ No amount of words on his part would ever get Sam to understand his value, but where did he even start, how did he explain to someone so pious his own worth beyond measure? _

_ Because Sam breathed here, because Sam belonged here with the hold that came from thirsty roots that Dean would never know. Not for a place, not for a concept as abstract and demanding of him as faith proved to be, and Dean didn’t need to understand, he didn’t need to get it. Not when Sam held enough faith in that golden heart of his for the both of them, pure to the bone and sunlight contained whenever he turned those glimmering yellow fire eyes in his direction. Sam had enough faith to keep them afloat contained within the magnolia and cedar twine of his ribs, he had enough of a heart to care and Dean would fill in the spaces between, he would put himself as the blood and the bite and the rage necessary to keep them above ground for as long as Sam would have him. _

_ And radiant was he, illuminated in the mockery of heaven beneath the only guiding, golden light that Dean would ever be able to give him. It set a glow across his body where it broke on his face and shoulders, disrupted there where the remainder of the stream fell to the altar. He could see his brother breathing, and Sam lifted his face up into it then as if warmed from the inside, poppies and daisies for his blood. Sunlight upon his face, and from where he sat still Dean couldn’t see his face, but he couldn’t help but wonder if Sam’s eyes still lingered on the statue of Christ.  _

_ Dean could only hope his praise had turned inward, could only watch the dust that lingered in the air turn to swirling glitter around the sun glow that had consumed his brother.  _

_ “You ever get these horrible feelings sometimes?” _

_ A low sound from Sam’s throat, nothing more than a hum, but they had never ignored one another and he didn’t expect his brother to start now. But Dean didn’t know why he had even spoken in the first place, and he didn’t know where to go to continue, and he faltered. And Sam seemed to know then, because his body tipped back a little further, braced on the altar a little harder and Dean watched his elbows bend beneath the oversized Metallica hoodie he’d lifted from Dean’s duffle three hunts back. _

_ “Isn’t that what this life is all about? Running head first half cocked with a horrible feeling in our guts?” _

_ There was a bitter, deep set tone in his voice, and it carried along the wooden rafters. A sour sound, a harsh sound, like Sam had grown to expect nothing less than a constant, underlying edge of anxiety to rattle through his veins and it only added to the curdle that had taken root in Dean’s own. Because Sam shouldn’t expect that sort of thing, because Sam should be in school, because Sam should have friends that weren’t just Dean and he should have plans for a Friday night that didn’t include trying to keep his organs inside of himself.  _

_ They deserved better. _

_ Sam deserved better. _

_ But he could feel that low, slow roil in his abdomen that set itself into his system every time he passed the heavy, holy doors for sacred ground and Dean wanted to gag. _

_ “I’m going to die in one of these churches one day.” _

_ There was blood on the face of Christ where he had bled from his thorn crown, nailed to the cross as he was and there were shadows then on Sam’s own when his brother turned. When his brother twisted about to stare at Dean with widened eyes, holy fire in his shadowed face and the amber light from the church’s stained glass kissed down upon him like a beacon. Glitter dust and warm wood, his brother looked ethereal, his brother looked noble.  _

_ His brother looked as beautiful as he did furious and Dean would have smiled had he not felt so nauseous.  _

_ “Dean, what the fuck?” _

_ Young enough still for his voice to break, human enough for all that Dean’s brain said otherwise to be overwhelmed, Sam was still his for all that he was otherworldly here, purgatory signal fire trapped in mortal flesh. And he was so offended, as if Dean had done him a personal harm by saying such a thing, but Sam looked like a warrior of Heaven where he stood, indignant rage and personal affront all coiled tight around the call of a self appointed holy crusade. Had the amber stained glass not set beams of gold down upon him, Dean would have thought to look for a halo somewhere above his bronze cast hair.  _

_ He didn’t know where to begin to look to try and find something that didn’t look Heaven sent about his brother then, caught up in the holy water fire of his golden eyes and the shimmering sway of glitter dust all in the air around him.  _

_ “I don’t know Sammy, just-” _

_ “You shouldn’t say that shit!” _

_ How his voice echoed across the rafters, such a commanding tone for someone so young and Dean wanted to give him everything just to make him stop. Instead Dean watched him, the way his hands smacked down upon the altar, the curl of his fingers and the aching emotion in his shadowed expression. With his arms spread and his shoulders curled, Sam looked as angry as Dean often felt, furious with everything and damn it, but he had never wished that sort of rage on his baby, he had never wanted Sam to know that burn.  _

_ It would eat at Sam like it had eaten at him, the bitter cut of feeling that confused from the inside and Sam was better than that. Sam didn’t need the primal thunder in his veins like Dean did, he didn’t need that contempt to get him through every desperate situation John had left them in that had driven Dean to his knees. He didn’t need to survive like that, not when Dean could do it for both of them, not when Dean could give Sam a chance to find a way out but oh, that kind of anger looked breathtaking on his face.  _

_ “It’s the Goddamn truth.” _

_ And Sam shook his head, a fly of hair that needed cut and a shut clench of his eyes, that sunburn of them lost for a moment. But his hands didn’t leave the altar, and Dean wondered if there would be marks from his nails upon the magnolia wood, if there would be proof of the anger that had been pressed against the altar’s top, the desperation.  _

_ “Stop, ple-” _

_ “I feel it in my bones, Sam, every single time we walk into one of these places. I feel it in my gut, and what’ve we been taught about that?” _

_ His head hung then, bowed beneath the spill of light and Dean watched as those shoulders curled, as Sam seemed to shake. But his little brother lifted his head enough to find him again, firefly shine in his eyes and something burning and sad in his expression that Dean hated to have put there. He couldn’t apologize for the truth though regardless of how it had burned his tongue, and he couldn’t find a single word to try and make Sam feel better in that moment when Dean himself had just begun to grow resigned to his fate no matter how imagined.  _

 

-

 

The ceiling had a popcorn texture on it. 

Stamped up there while the paint was wet with a broom possibly, he wasn’t necessarily sure how exactly that effect was accomplished. It looked like it had taken some amount of skill though and some measure of time to go with it and he respected that if nothing else. And he’d thought about this, and he’s watched this ceiling and stared at it for hours at a time some nights, only a few minutes on others, but it never changed despite how long he looked. It didn’t turn colors with cigarette stains, it didn’t lose its texture, it didn’t become something other than that off set of white. 

The Singer Scrapyard sign out at the drive was double faced, tall over the gravel and familiar even in the dark. It flickered through the window, pulses of orange and purple neon that chased patterns across the ceiling, caused violent shadows in sunburn glow and violet bruise hues to tangle amongst the popcorn drip. Splatters of neon with no discernible rhythm and he watched the colors flicker across the ceiling, expected them to drip from the pointless peaks that had been stamped onto it and splash down on his face. 

No bleeding color though and Dean just stared at the ceiling, watched it as the unfamiliar silence of the second floor kept trying its best to sink its teeth into his bones. One arm above his head, the other on his chest, his pillow was soft and his mattress  _ his _ in a way that Dean hadn’t ever known before. His bed in his room and he should have been comfortable here, things to call his own with a dresser that had accumulated his clothes and his boots downstairs in the closet next to the front door. 

He had been comfortable here for months. 

But it was uncharacteristically silent on the second floor, Bobby out for a long weekend with Rufus at casinos that they didn’t need to go to and Dean found it frustratingly quiet in his absence. 

He wanted to reach up and touch that ceiling not for the first time, and he wanted to get up and dangle out of his window with a cigarette between his teeth. Because Bobby had said no smoking in the house and Dean had just nodded, had just watched Sam grin behind the turn of Bobby’s back because that bedroom window opened without a sound and it was horribly easy to pop the screen. And he wanted to, wanted to get out of this bed and feel the night air on his skin, he wanted grave dirt beneath his nails and blacktop beneath his tires, a bitter burn of something starting to fester low in the hollow beneath his lungs where the violets and clover had planted their tangled roots. 

And forever cursed to be a Winchester was he, an almost violent wanderlust bred into his bones with his feet never given the chance to know any better. 

The hand upon his chest lifted to instead touch his face and rub at his eyes, and the slumberous silence of the house broke in an instant. A hard quake overtook the walls and sent his bed swaying, the window chattering in its frame and the furniture in the room began to edge across the floor. The whole house overtaken by it, he could hear the same clatter from the pictures and things out in the hall, the groaning of the bones that held the home together ringing from the walls.

Like the whole building wanted to come down around him, but it was the cacophony of sounds that propelled Dean to his feet, hands scrambling as he threw himself from his bed to take into the hall in nothing more than his briefs. 

Muted, overly harsh and blaring all at once, his head felt like it could crack in two from the split pulse roar of an ocean far greater than any he would ever know even as his skin flashed hot from the smash of trumpets that tasted like a frantic, frenzied hurricane in the back of his throat. Down the stairs so quickly he nearly fell even as his head screamed with the cyan tinged curl of voiceless laughter, it was a hand on the banister that kept him from smacking into the door, swung him around until he could throw himself down the hall. And there was Rosie on the back porch pawing at the door, he could see her from where he ran but it was safer outside, surely, surely it was safer outside and so he left her there even as she howled, yanked open the door for the basement and threw himself down those stairs. 

_ “Sam!” _

The lights flickered wildly down in the basement, bursts of brightness that crackled and snapped and even as he thundered down the stairs did a few of the bulbs over spark and shatter themselves out. Glass rained down around him even as the world continued to roar its tidal plea, hot and sharp on his skin and Dean ran with bare feet quickly embedded with the shards into the little hall that lead to the room his brother had made for himself. The lights popped out behind him as he went, hisses of sound beneath the choral screaming resonating in his chest but he gave no pause, he pushed at the half open insult of Sam’s door even as the ground beneath his feet trembled. 

But that was his brother there, that was his baby with his hands fisted in the sheet beneath him and his body half curled. Sweat on his barbed wire tortured skin that coiled down his chest, disappeared beneath the band of his loose gym shorts and Dean threw himself through the doorway. Because his face had contorted into the kind of scream that Dean remembered a sixteen year old with night terrors pressing that exact split wide mouth against his throat as Dean tried to desperately muffle his sounds. Because Sam should have been screaming, his mouth wide and his eyes pressed tight with such an expression of terror on his face, such rage in his skin. 

But Dean couldn’t hear his voice, not a single cry that he recognized and then did he falter as he knew, and then did his body hurt as he hesitated and his heart broke. Because that electric cyan dripping sound was Sam, that Marianas Trench unrest came from somewhere in his little brother’s lungs with the firebrand breathing lick of something holy on its bubbling, seafroth crest and the promise of a crystal fractal force that would tear the world asunder. 

_ Sam ain’t human, at least, not completely. John never talked much about him, not what mattered, but I know he knew something. Told me I needed to kill him if it ever turned out that the two of you couldn’t. _

His heart in his throat, his whole world threatening to split in two and Dean just wanted to pull Sam against his chest like he’d been able to do when the boy sobbed in his sleep at sixteen where a ghoul had tried to take his legs. 

And God but how everything hurt, glass in his skin and electricity in his veins but his heart hurt the worse. For all of his black poplar bones and his oleander skin, Dean felt weak then, felt small and helpless in the way that Sam shook, because he couldn’t fix something like this, he couldn’t make this sort of thing better. 

“Oh, Sammy.”

Sam’s eyes had always been bright, the sort of golden topaz glowing hue that brought to mind shades of the sun. But it was different now, the shutter flick of his eyelids showed the sunspot blinding glow of them, and his little brother seemed to burn from the inside with a fire that Dean couldn’t see. Sam stared at him though, or maybe past him, impossible to tell with such a color and such a glow and Dean couldn’t even begin to reach out, to try and comfort before his vision skimmed sideways. 

Before his little brother stared at him and used nothing more than a blink to send his body screaming back out into the hall. What few lights remained threatened to burst even as they streamed past him and Dean couldn’t catch himself on a single thing, couldn’t hear himself shouting over the pleading symphony that crawled from every available surface. But where he expected the wall at the far end of the basement he instead hit something else, smashed into something metallic and hard that stopped his travel and knocked him to the floor instead with such a force that his vision swam and he gagged violently. 

Hands barely supporting him, head bowed as he tried to keep from vomiting into the shattered glass that littered the floor. It was in his palms though, it was diamond edge pressed deep into his skin and there would be no getting that out, and part of him wondered if there would ever even be any getting up.

But there was noise above him, behind him, different than the clamour of disjointed feeling and trumpet tidal fear that Sam screamed. Deeper, soothing, string instruments and something arching, a midsummer night's breeze and the crescendo twirl waltz of fireflies against a blush soft predawn sky. 

These were  _ words _ , ones that he didn’t know in a language that he couldn’t even begin to understand. But there was something hot in his ears, for everything was suddenly muted and dull, for there was a scalding wet on either side of his face that ran liquid paths from his ears down to the hinges of his jaw.

He pushed himself up enough then with a rolling gag to balance on his knees, to look behind him even as that something wet dripping off his jaw. And there was someone there, there was someone behind him with nimble ivory greaves with curling golden details and seams, heavily plated cuisses decorated much in the same that moved like a glimmering skin. He would have given into the desire to touch had he not held such a fear of being burned by the shine of it and his eyes travelled further still till he found what he sought. 

Too bright blue eyes that shone with a blistering light from the inside and no priest should ever have the six point curling cradle of seraph wings spined and tipped in glossy, molten gold.

Small comfort in that Father Castiel looked just as underprepared as he himself felt.

“Dean.”

His name spoken in such a deep tone and it echoed to his aching bones, something he could understand. And he could feel it more than he could hear it, knew the rumble of that single word, but even then the deafening rush had fallen silent around him, but even then the rattle of the entire house had stopped its dance to come down on his head. Everything sounded underwater and thick, his own breathing muffled and strange, but Castiel stared down at him with a faint gap to his mouth as if he knew not what to say next. 

One meticulously plated ivory and gold gauntlet reached for him, as if the man had forgotten the burst of swirling, ethereal fire that spiraled, contained between the curl of his fingers. He flinched from it, abused knees dug further into the shattered glass beneath him and his heart thundered a panic sour dance behind his teeth because that was Sam back behind him, that was Sam that he had left. That was Sam who might have needed him, who was alone, and Dean tried to push to his feet only to fall to his forearms into the crystal glass, only to cry out as they cut into him anew and drew more blood out into the air. 

A fizzing pop and he was upright, and he was seated, and he could  _ hear _ . No liquid slosh of vomit in the back of his throat, no pained pulse of his heart across his skin for nothing hurt and he could breathe. And Dean blinked hard, stared at the tight snap shut of Sam’s bedroom door from the inside, and only then did he understand. Because he stared at the door from the inside, at the bookshelves laid into the walls and the soft china rug on the floor, and he couldn’t turn from where he sat before something autumnal afternoon lush and agrimony petal soft curled around his ribs, his heart and yanked him back across the bed into a set of waiting hands. 

Hands that he knew, hands that he had loved since he was four years old and determined to make sure his little brother had all of his tiny fingers, and he could feel them now as they caught on his skin, as one arm coiled about his waist while the other banded across his shoulders and collar. Dean’s head tipped with it, pressed up and back on instinct but that was Sam behind him, Sam’s shoulder at the back of his neck and his little brothers chest burning a crimson iron sear against his spine. Knees pulled up against his sides, Sam caged him in, Sam bracketed him in place against his chest and held him there like Dean belonged. 

“Sammy?”

His brother’s body tightened around him, pulled Dean back further against his chest and he knew that smell then, he knew the sugar crystal clear of it that echoed beneath the bittersweet of hemlock on his brother’s skin for what it was then. For holy water sang through Sam’s veins, because it had always been there for all that Dean had never even recognized but he knew it now for exactly what it was, pressed skin to skin like this and aching. He could feel those scars then, every barbed wire torture line that bound itself across his brothers chest and arms and he could see them on his legs even where they twinned tight around his thighs, his calves and his ankles. He knew them and yet they shouldn’t have looked like this, and yet they had never been like this, never before had Sam’s skin been licked through by that same crackling, golden bright that Dean had seen for his eyes just moments ago. 

But there were others he felt there against his shoulder, against his lower back, ones he couldn’t see and didn’t recognize for the biting slice of healed barbed wire wounds. They were something else, something different that he hadn’t seen as of yet and such a notion made his stomach roil. As if in response, Sam’s palm slipped and clutched tight at his side, held Dean so furiously that he worried for a moment his little brother would be able to reach the fractal glass roses that stained his back. 

Like he could come out of his skin, like he could shake clean from his bones but Sam held him fiercely like he owned him, Sam held him like nothing could ever take him away and for all that he wanted to fight something, for all that part of him felt afraid, never before had he felt so safe. And Dean sank back against his brothers chest despite himself, fell into the chiranthodendron hold of his arms and let Sam be the strong one for once, let Sam protect him for a change.

And his furious little brother took to it as readily as Dean himself had ever done, held the elder tight against him when they were suddenly no longer alone in the room. Another crackling, fizzing sound in the air and then there were three, and then Castiel stood in the center of the room before them in that same ethereal glow that Dean had witnessed out in the hall. 

_ “You will not take him from me.” _

His plackart had been done in the same pristine swirls of ivory and gold, but those lines came together at his chest to pull into the shape of a two headed lion, thick brushes of gold that swept up the angels sides to meet at his breast and the image repeated itself at his pauldrons and Dean was only given a moment to see them in full. For he took to a knee then, as if that was what angels did, wings sleek feathered and golden edged that curled from his person. He took to a knee and clasped both hands at the hilt of his sword, the pearly steel of it cut through in the hollowed center by that same flicker of holy fire that he had held in his other hand.

And Castiel bowed his head low, gave his gaze to the delicate rug where his sword tip had pressed, and he could feel Sam steady and strong behind him. 

“Never, my Lord.”

Those arms around him tightened, Sams legs pulled a little tighter, and every scar that he could see seemed to crack open, bled glistering streaks of bottled sunlight onto Sam’s summer loved skin and Dean watched as his little brothers skin dripped liquid gold that sparked and took to the air in a steam like sway of shimmering light. The delicate clock that Sam had hung on the wall read just past three and there were puncture scars upon the tops of his feet, a single each but they matched the ones laid into his wrists and Dean knew then what he had tried to desperately to ignore. 

Because Sam had always been meant for better things even if nobody had ever agreed with him. 

He couldn’t help himself then, couldn’t even try to hold himself together and instead Dean’s chest wound tight and his fingers dug into Sam’s arms as he started to cry. Hot tears upon his cheeks for Sam had never really been his, for nothing had ever been this good and such was a gift that hadn’t been his to have and he should have died in that basement. Helenium and amaranthus, sardony and winter cherry, he couldn’t breathe for the blooms in his chest and throat and the misery that they bled down into his belly and his blood. 

And Sam noticed, because Sam knew everything even when Dean tried his best and Sam’s hold on him went tight, and Sam pulled him back further against his chest until Dean had nowhere to go. The room had started to shiver once more, the walls threatened to quake but Castiel kept his head low where he had bowed before them. 

“No harm will come to the Prophet by my hands, you have my word, my Lord.”

He couldn’t tell which one of them had started shaking. Maybe it was him, maybe he had never stopped the bone fissure trembles that had set in from the moment he had thrown himself from bed, or maybe it was Sam. Sam with his sunbeam bleeding skin and his stone grip, Sam who had always been pious and pure but an angel stood bowed before them on Sam’s bedroom floor. 

_ “Why are you calling us that?” _

The lights flickered wildly, and he couldn’t help the way he braced himself against his brothers chest or how his hands brand kissed bruises into Sam’s forearms. Sam was scalding behind him, hot against his skin and he burned electric with the crackle of sunlight rising from his seam line scars and part of Dean worried he would turn to ash at his touch. 

“For it is true. You are the son of God, the Savior of man and he is the Prophet, your chosen Keeper and you are my Lords for whom I am honored to serve as Guardian for however you require.”

The blistering heat snuffed out just as quickly as the smoke curl rise of sun glitter stopped its ascension and Sam just held him instead. Sam held him and curled in close over his back, pulled Dean against him and suddenly he was unsure then just who protected who with how they clung to one another. But Sam shook behind him and Dean couldn’t hold him like he wanted, but Sam felt ready to come apart at the edges against his back and Dean couldn’t reach his face. 

Sam pressed his mouth to one monochrome rose bloom, and Dean could feel the press of his teeth just as much as he could feel something wet and hot and-

He knew that hiccuping, shuddering sound like Sam couldn’t get enough air, he knew that thin rattle from in his chest and it made something furious rise in Dean’s own. Because Sam muffled sobbing breaths against his spine and cried dripping hot tears even as he pressed his face against Dean’s skin, even as his arms banded tight and sent a grind through the red poppy fields of his ribs. But Sam was  _ crying _ and he couldn’t reach him and Dean felt ready to force himself from the bed to maim the angel with his bare hands for causing such a thing. 

But he couldn’t reach no matter how he tried to turn, and Sam held onto him with a grip that he couldn’t seem to break free from no matter how he twisted or pulled. 

“Why can’t we just be  _ normal _ ?”

We.

We, because Dean was included in this, because Dean had as much of a part in this as Sam did whether he wanted to or not. He just wanted his baby and his car, he just wanted to not feel hungry or hurt way deep down in his bones, he just wanted Sam to be happy. They had never asked for any of this, neither of them had thought to know what to make of this, and between their tattoos and their scars, he wondered if they ever even really felt human in their own skins. 

“You are Samuel and Dean Winchester, never were your lives to be easy. Who have shouldered the sufferings of mankind upon your skins and souls, but you have been ever loved by the Father and eternally worthy of Heaven’s splendor, for its glory is yours.”

The both of them flinched then, Sam jolted against him while Dean’s body shook on an inhale, but he didn’t turn his head. For Sam hadn’t listed his and one of them needed to stare the angel down, one of them needed to be strong so the other could break and he would take the weight of this now so Sam didn’t have to. 

And Castiel lifted his head while Dean stared as if commanded, and he stared at Dean past the intricate plated finger curves of his ivory gauntlets. And his eyes were blue, an inhuman light within them and something holy in the color that Dean understood now, that he knew now for just what it was. But he recognized remorse there, but he recognized humility and dare he say that the angel was ashamed of himself and how he had lied, and Dean hoped so if only for Sam’s sake. 

But his mouth had always gotten the better of him, and his insides burned with such a sinister coil of self-disgust and aching acceptance all at once.

“Murders don’t have a place in Heaven.”

“Dean!”

Sam then, Sam with his voice far less muffled and his hold far more intent and oh, but his voice was still wet, but his face still tacky where he pressed it against Dean’s shoulder. And Dean didn’t deserve that sort of love, he didn’t deserve those sort of touches or the way that Sam seemed so content to just hold him, to have him. And he couldn’t lie to him, and he couldn’t keep it from him, but what sort of person did that make him?

What sort of son?

“I killed John.”

Hollow inside, aching from his core and he expected Sam to pull back from him, he expected it to  _ hurt _ . 

_ “I know _ .”

And it did, it did in the way that Sam spoke against the curve of his ear even as he pulled Dean further against him, even as he held Dean close and warm and safe against his body. A shaking kiss to the side of his throat, the tacky press of Sam’s tear stained face against his skin but his little love didn’t leave him, and his little love didn’t let go. 

Castiel stared at the two of them over the crest of his gauntlets still with nary a blink, and his voice was soothing for all that it was grave. 

“ _ Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. _ You may think yourself a murderer, Dean Winchester, but know that the devil wears the skin of those we often wish to love, and the light of Heaven never had need to forgive you for what you have done.”


	7. Hops

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the midst of moving, things are super hectic but I had this, and wanted to do it and share it before I went back to packing or went into work. Welcome darlings! UNEDITED

_ It was usually a good thing when it rained, a rumble of thunder that slid into his bones that made them feel whole for a moment and a rare, gossamer quiet that settled in the back of his head. It sent a hush across his nerves, the sound of rain on the roof of the car and the splat of it against the glass calmed him like his mother’s singing probably once had. But he hadn’t had that in a while, and though the rain had been coming down in steady sheets since yesterday morning Dean felt ready to come out of his skin just from being stuck in a room with them.  _

_ The AC unit in the wall had kicked out the night before, and since the room was just theirs, he and Sam had slept with the windows open just to try and kill some of the heat. Just to try to get something moving in the air between them, something other than the tension from having John so close, something more than the curdle in Dean’s belly brought on by the things yet unsaid.  _

_ Because Dean had found that stupid, cruel, perfect envelope in Sam’s duffel three states back and a month ago, and he had simply stood there and stared at it for the longest time while Sam took up all the hot water. And he’d opened it like he shouldn’t have, curious where he would only hate himself, and words like acceptance and full ride had pulled hot, burning tears to his eyes and a choked sob to his lungs. As proud as he had been devastated, and Dean had carefully put the envelope back in the bottom of his brothers bag, had scrubbed at his face and begged off when the water shut off with a claim of getting food.  _

_ Because John had a room three down from them now and had for the past two nights, and for as much as Dean had tried to keep everybody separated as best he could to keep down on the screaming, the two of them had found a way at each other's throats anyway. Some things never changed, and for all the times that Dean had tried to keep his head down and just keep the two of them fed, Sam had grown a tongue made of basil and thorns that dripped a festering hatred for the Winchester patriarch that couldn’t be curbed or contained. His little brother had turned volatile and cruel under the heavy, absent hand of John, and Dean would have been beside himself if he hadn’t felt so proud.  _

_ But he wanted to stand out in that deep Louisiana downpour just to get away from them, if he couldn’t keep them off of each other long enough to keep them from bleeding than he would just throw himself to the rain instead. There was no stopping them from tearing into one another and there was no helping the ways that they decided to bite into him just as often and Dean wanted to be selfish and save himself, wanted to give himself to the rain that had never done a single thing to harm him.  _

_ Maybe he could lose himself in it, maybe it would drown him out in the dark, but then Sam gave him a desperate look with those midnight sun burning eyes and he lost himself all over again. Because he couldn’t say no to Sam, and he couldn’t just leave Sam standing there looking like that with his face flushed in a rage and a trigger hair tremble of a fight coursing through his body.  _

_ “You’ll be nothing but a danger if you can’t follow fucking orders, boy. Do you want to be the reason your brother gets his guts chewed out one of these days?” _

_ And Sam had flinched so hard Dean had expected to hear his bones pop, and Sam had stared at John with such a murderous, malicious curl to his mouth that Dean had thought he would need to throw himself forward and catch his brother with his bare hands. He’d stayed tall though, he hadn’t moved, neither of them had while John spat out another explicative before telling them when they’d head out in the morning, before slamming out of their room with a harsh rattle of the door and the sound of the midnight rain. _

_ Five minutes of silence, of John being gone and something electric nausea hot building in Dean’s lungs. Five minutes of Sam not talking and he couldn’t take that, not with the anger he could feel on his little love’s skin, not with the contempt he could just catch in those eyes. Because Sam still stared at the place that John had been with a clenched jaw and curled fists, and there was a bus he needed to catch in five hours if he wanted to get to Stanford by Monday for all that he hadn’t even told Dean yet.  _

_ He had a horrible feeling that Sam was going to stagnate and stay if he didn’t make him go, and he couldn’t stand for that, wouldn’t let him get away with that. One of them needed to survive the tyranny of John Winchester, and he would force the younger with his bare hands if it meant that Sam got to be safe. Being left behind wouldn’t matter, and he hadn’t been without Sam in eighteen years, but he would learn how to live like that. _

_ “Grab your bag.” _

_ “Dean?” _

_ His little brother startled then, wide sungloss eyes and something instantly loose around his mouth, it was heady to be the only calm Sam needed. It was a rush to be needed by Sam at all, and Dean wanted to curl his arms around him and band the other to his chest. But they were eye level now, but Sam wasn’t quite so little now.  _

_ But Sam didn’t need him now. _

_ “Grab your fucking bag, Samuel.” _

_ And his little brother just stood there, a furrow overtaking his brow and his mouth falling open on a confused gap. Like he didn’t understand and why would he? Dean had never talked to him like that, Dean had never been that sort of barking, cruel forceful with him. But Sam didn’t move, and Dean didn’t have time for that, knew damn well that he wouldn’t let Sam leave if he didn’t make him do it now.  _

_ Their duffles still sat on the only table in the room, same place they had been for the last three days and the same place they always were in every single motel room they ever got themselves into. Three strides and he caught his brothers duffle in a quick fist, waterproofed by nature and heavy with the same weight as always and he caught Sam’s arm with the other. Grip tight, he hauled his little brother to the door and God, he hoped it hurt, he hoped his fingers left bruises that Sam would look at for days, he wanted his brother to carry more than just Dean’s heart with him when he left. _

_ Sam stumbled, unsteady on his feet even as he cried out, a shout of Dean’s name that cut at his skin with the stinging roots of Judas trees. But the door came open easily and the space around them instantly grew loud with the ferocious pour of the rain that had laid claim to the world. He could barely see the car, he could only just make out the steady glow of streetlights through it all, and he wanted to drag his little brother back inside just to keep him dry. But it didn’t work like that, but Sam wouldn’t leave like that, but that wouldn’t help them and Dean couldn’t stand guard over him for the rest of Sam’s life.  _

_ Their door slammed shut behind them, the smacking sound lost out here beneath the torrent of rain and Dean didn’t hesitate for all that something in his chest pleaded and screamed. He couldn’t afford to falter now and so he threw the both of them out into the rain, off the curb and into the darkness where the glaring red neon turned the water into blood. It soaked them in an instant, drenched them to the bone even as it steamed from the pavement in climbing crimson curls.  _

_ “Dean!” _

_ They didn’t stop at the car though, didn’t go near it, and his heart thundered in his throat even as he dragged his little brother out into the middle of the lot. The bright sign that screamed vacancies overhead seemed to mock him and Dean wanted to shoot at it, wanted to kick out the color until he couldn’t see the world around them. Until he couldn’t see the bright eyed betrayal on Sam’s face when he forced the younger ahead of him, away from him.  _

_ Soaked clean through and slumped shouldered, his wide mouth downturned and Sam looked as pathetic as Dean felt, looked just as overwhelmed and beaten down.  _

_ But he needed Sam gone before John woke up, he needed him clear of the city before John came back. He’d hit his breaking point on just how much he could keep his baby safe from, and the best thing he could do at this point was put more distance between them than Dean had ever wanted in his life. Because John couldn’t hurt Sam if he couldn’t reach him, and Dean would make himself the monster here just because it needed to be done.  _

_ Sammy liked to talk about God like the man actually cared, but if he cared at all then surely he had never meant for them to live like this. _

_ “Don’t you Dean me, get!” _

_ Quick motions, hard motions and Sam’s duffle slapped against his chest. Little brother had reflexes though, caught it in his arms before it could drop to the flooded pavement and held it against him like it was all he had. And it was, their whole lives divvied up and contained in two duffle bags and their lives had never felt quite so wretched for all that they’d lived with varying stages of terrified since Dean was five years old and what was left of John just seemed to snap. _

_ “Dean?” _

_ And God, he sounded so sad, so scared, and Dean welcomed the rain then like he usually welcomed an empty car, a shower, because at least the horrific spill of blood water would hide the way he’d started to cry, helpless against it. Because Sam sounded so lost, and he’d done that, and he watched his little brother just stand there in the hot Louisiana rain. His entire existence narrowed down to that, to this stupid, stubborn, perfect boy looking like the sky had come down on him in a Morgan City motel lot.  _

_ The air between them was awash with red though, and Dean wondered if he would ever be able to get this midnight blood off of his skin.  _

_ “Go! You wanted out and you’ve got it, this is your perfect chance to go be normal!” _

_ “Why are you doing this?” _

_ His voice broke when he yelled like that, desperation curling and grief heavy because Dean had never talked to him like this, Dean had never yelled quite like this. But his own heartache made him angry, but his own burning need for Sam to make something of himself outweighed what his little brother thought of him then.  _

_ The more Sam hated him meant the further he would run.  _

_ “I saw the fucking envelope, Sam! College? You’ve never wanted this, fucking lie to me and tell me you want to be here!” _

_ “Dea-” _

_ “Do it!” _

_ Thunder boomed somewhere above them when he opened his mouth, guttural cry framed by the bone quake roll of it that he felt scrape through his veins. It made him feel alive for all that he thought he was dying, the rhythm in his pulse the shovel toss beat of his cemetery ribcage being hollowed out by his own hands. There would be nothing left to salvage on the inside, and he could only hope that Sam managed to save his heart and took it with him when he left.  _

_ “I can’t!” _

_ He knew how Sam’s voice cracked when he cried, he knew the sharp break that ran through it, and Dean heard it then. Over the thunder and the rain, he watched the only boy he would ever love come apart at the seams and break down under the Louisiana rains that threatened to drown them, in the steaming, humid darkness that seemed almost eager to consume them. Sam clutched his duffle to his chest like it was the only thing that could save him now, and his face had broken wide with bitter emotion that Dean hated to have put there.  _

_ And his body hurt, watching the way his little brother had finally been beaten down by his own hands no less, and there would be no making this better. There would be no taking this back, there would be no apologizing for this. Sammy might never come back, and he felt like he was going to be sick there on the pavement, but he needed to make sure it happened.  _

_ "You get out and don't you ever fucking come back." _

_ He could hear him crying.  _

_ Dean could hear the sob that took his little brothers breath and he wanted to shut his eyes, wanted to turn his head away, he wanted to kiss it better like he’d been able to do when Sam was four years old and busted his knee. _ __  
_ "Dea-" _ _  
_ __ "There is nothing for you here, Sam."

_ Thunder rumbled all around them, the heavy deluge hadn’t deemed it necessary to give them a moment's reprieve, but the violent blood rain gave them a false privacy, pulled the world down to the way Dean knew damn well nobody else would be able to hear them. Nobody would hear the way he’d broken his own heart all while breaking his brother down, and Dean wanted to scream himself hoarse until Sam turned and ran.  _

_ “Fucking go!” _

_ And he did.  _

_ Sam watched him for a long minute out in the rain like he knew, like he could see into Dean’s head and his chest and knew the things that rotted there, and then he turned. He took his duffle and Dean’s heart with him and he walked across the lot with the same head high stride Dean had taught him to wear despite it all. He stomped through the water and out to the street and he wondered how long it would take Sam to find the money he’d hidden in that envelope, and Dean watched him until his stupid, soaked through hoodie had disappeared from view.  _

_ And he started to sob them, hands clasping over his mouth in a futile effort to muffle the sounds that the rain swallowed up and his body ached, heartbreak fierce, but he’d done this to himself, and he’d done this for Sam.  _

_ That didn’t help the way he screamed out his grief into the heavy, hot rain.  _

 

-

 

“You taste like nicotine.”

“That’s what happens when you use almost a whole pack in two days.”

A steady puff of cigarette smoke took to the air, curled between them and blocked his little brothers face from view. Those holy sun eyes blinked at him, Sam stared at him with a furrowed brow and something pinched and sad about his pretty, ethereal face, but the smoke took that away for a minute and let him pretend otherwise, it let him forget. They could just be Sam and Dean for however long it clung to the air and hid their faces and their frowns and the tired bruises beneath their eyes, but the illusion never lasted long enough to settle bone deep like he needed it to, never hung around enough for him to fool himself into thinking they could be normal. 

And they never had been, and he didn’t know who he had spent his life trying to assure more to the contrary, Sam or himself.

“Why are you smoking this much? You never smoke this much.”

Because Sam knew him all over again like he hadn’t had the chance to in years, and Sam knew him enough to know how often he smoked, and even then how much he liked to smoke at a time. Sam knew him after more months in one spot than Dean had ever spent stagnant in his life, and he loved him for it as much as part of Dean wanted to resent him then, but that wasn’t fair, but he could never. 

How could he resent the only person he had ever loved just as much as he hated himself? 

“Shit, I don’t know Sam, somewhere between you knowing I blew John’s brains out and you being literal Jesus fucking Christ, I’ve gotten just a little stressed.”

Sarcasm heavy on his tongue where it mingled with the glaze of nicotine smoke on his breath, Sam had found him up on the roof despite his best half-assed efforts and Dean didn’t know what else he had expected even if he’d welcomed the warm, sure greeting kiss he’d been given. Sam always found him whether Dean wanted him to or not, had never left him alone with the demons in his head even when Sam had been dead and gone and a glimmering echo in his chest. 

Hot shingles under his bare back and the sky didn’t look quite so big anymore, the world didn’t feel so overwhelmingly grand. Everything he could ever possibly want could be held in the palm of his gun calloused hands now, his words were sacred where they fell from his lavender lips and his dreams evermore than they seemed, and Dean hated every single bit of it. Was he supposed to feel humbled? Honored? He didn’t have the first clue what they expected of him, what they wanted from him when the only thing he’d ever wanted was to take care of Sammy. 

“Can you not say it like that? I don’t...I’m not... _ Dean.” _

“Yeah, Sammy. Yeah.”

Because he sounded so worn thin and desperate in how he said his name, and Dean had torn his own heart out denying him like that. So he leaned into the feeling of sun hot skin when Sam flopped down on the roof beside him, shingles groaning beneath his brothers shoulders while he pressed them arm to arm and tight together. Dean could feel his scars then, jagged and thick but he knew how far they spread now just like he knew how Sam arched, sweat slick above him and he wanted to press his mouth to one. 

Sam deserved all the kisses he could give if they made him feel any better, just like he deserved to be able to sleep without waking Dean as he shivered in his sleep. 

Because he had that haunted look in his eyes that Dean had spent their entire lives trying to chase away. Because he had those lack of sleep bruises that he’d finally been without for the first time in their lives. Because he’d gone back to holding Dean’s hand every chance he got like he was scared something would take him away, like Dean mattered at all, like Dean was the important one. 

Like anybody other than Sam had ever really cared, but he’d let his brother believe what he wanted so long as it made him happy. 

“I hate this.”

A hot day in early October, but the sun still seemed intent to climb high and give him false hope about the weather. It was too hot to work out in the yard though, and he couldn’t get his shaking hands to wrap around a tool long enough to work on the Dart like he wanted. But Bobby kept watching the both of them with these concerned, furrowed browed expressions that Dean didn’t know how to take that kind of care, that kind of  _ love _ . 

So he’d been up on the roof instead for so long his skin had stopped feeling hot for all that he’d started out on his belly, staring out at the city in the distance over the ridge that ran the roofs peek like the buildings could answer his questions where they wavered in the heat. He’d rolled over less than an hour prior, back gone so sun hot he couldn’t feel it but he knew enough to remember that cusp that came before sunburn that he didn’t feel like dealing with. His front had gone post noon warm to the touch, but Sam burned hotter, pressed so snug against his side that Dean could feel the way he breathed against his ribs. 

Arm lifted to take another pull from his cigarette and Sam pressed closer still, seamed himself against Dean’s side until he’d fitted under his arm, until he’d forced himself into that space against his ribcage where Dean used to hold him close. Sam claimed that spread of flesh now, curled himself against Dean like an overindulgent house cat while he rested his head against Dean’s chest, hard crushed his shoulder into the script of his name like he owned it.

And Dean guessed he did, owned that scrawling signature just like he had always owned everything other part of Dean. 

“I know, baby.”

Sam’s fingers dug into his side at that, arm stretched across his chest while Dean let out a low cloud of nicotine into the air. His teeth wanted to bite down on the filter, he wanted to pull in a long drag just to hold it in his lungs so long his head spun, see if he could drown out the piling expectations from up above with the roaring pound of his heart. Sam had other ideas it seemed, Sam made due by curling a little tighter against him and digging the tips of his fingers deep into Dean’s side. 

And he let him, happy just to have his brother close, happier still to have his lover pressed against him where he could keep him safe. 

“I’m here though, and I promised you I’d never leave again. So just- trust me? I’m gonna do everything I can to keep you safe.”

The sharp, stinging cut of nails against his skin and Dean nearly dropped his cigarette when he winced. His right arm tried to pull at Sam’s wrist, but his little brother just caught his forearm instead and slapped it down onto the roof. He used that hold as an anchor point, braced his weight and levered himself up and over until his weight settled just heavy enough and familiar now across Dean’s hips. But his eyes were brilliant, sharp slits of molten gold that stared down at Dean with something burning behind them, backlit with the same celestial pulse that he’d recognized in Castiel, that same sunbeam glimmer that he’d never known what to name. 

But he knew the name for it now, and he wouldn’t help but wonder at just how much of Heaven’s glory stared down at him even as his only love bared his teeth. 

He was beautiful there, perched on his lap like he had nowhere else to be. Backlit by the very sun that had lended its color for his eyes, part of Dean expected to see the same wings that come from Castiel curling out from his little brother’s spine. Expected him to drip with the same glimmering liquid gold that ran thick through his veins, but Sam just adjusted his bare knees on the shingles beneath them and sat a little straighter. 

“Sam-”

The sunlight caught on his bare shoulders, the tank top he’d chosen to wear looked almost too wide in the neck and Dean wondered for a moment if it were his instead. He couldn’t tell, didn’t recognize the fabric, but it looked good on his brothers frame either way. Sam braced that hand then on his belly long enough to settle his weight further, and Dean nearly arched up into him at the touch. 

Sam took his cigarette instead, plucked it clean from his fingers and caught it between his wide lips on a long drag.

“Hey, bitch!”

And he looked sinful like that, sungolden and burning hot wherever they touched, but he let go of that handhold on Dean’s stomach to instead lean back a bit. Just enough that an arch took his body, that Dean wanted to touch, but he didn’t know if he chased his brother or his cigarette as his hands came off the roof. 

It didn’t matter either way as his hands slammed back down beside his head with the same force that had pulled him about in the basement, and Sam blinked those burning eyes at him before flicking the cigarette off the roof, before speaking on an exhale of smoke that curled thick and pale from his lips.

“You love me.”

Like it was that easy, like that was the only thing that mattered. 

And he did, so it was.

His smile was lopsided, and he couldn’t touch Sam like he wanted, couldn’t get his hands on his little brother’s hips or his thighs, but the roof was warm beneath him, and he was content to watch Sam on his perch. Hands beside his head and Sam was smoke hazed, Sam was holy fire eyes and sacred hymns that had been written into the scars upon his skin that no amount of rain or sun could ever wash away. Christ alive and humble like Dean had never quite managed to be, Sam was just as beautiful with prayers on his lips as he was with the satin chase curl of fading smoke painting them.

Dean wondered just what he’d done in life to be considered worthy to love him like this.

“I really do, yeah.”

That seemed to give his little brother pause, but Sam smiled at him with those sharp fox eyes and a pull at his mouth that felt more frail than Dean cared for. Because his brother looked sad, looked for all like the world had come down on his shoulders, and the situation was only made worse by the new knowledge that it had indeed done just that. And the whole of everything really had fallen down around them, everything they had ever known lay in broken glass remains at their feet and Dean was scared to move, scared to breathe too heavy for fear of hurting, of bleeding. 

And Sam just looked so sad that he couldn’t hold his tongue. 

“Samm-”

“Shut up.”

He could see the shadowy silhouettes of delphiniums along Sam’s shoulders, ringed around his throat where they in turn draped low across his chest. Something dark across his face, something grave quiet in his eyes, but Sam spoke with the solid kind of voice that Dean remembered from exorcisms, from moments when Sam sewed him back together and from times where he carefully divided their money for a week, a month. 

He’d always listened when Sam spoke like that, and Castiel would surely call it the influence of Christ, but Dean had only ever known it to be love. 

“Just shut up for a couple minutes. You talk too much, and it’s like you don’t believe even half the things you say to me. I’m not six years old Dean, you can’t just flex your muscles and pop the collar on your leather jacket and make me think everything’s alright. I’m too old for that, and I love you, but you’re not a knight in shining armor. You tried to save me once, because you thought I wanted to be normal. You wanted me to have that so damn bad, but I-”

He shook his head, hair cast bronze in the light and his eyes molten, glimmering gold. Beautiful even like this, with words that Dean didn’t want to hear on his lips and a demand on his tongue that Dean couldn’t ignore, dahlias along every line of his body. 

“I was going to stay. Or make you come with me. I loved you so much, I didn’t want to leave you with John. Thought he was going to kill you. But you wouldn’t stop yelling, and I just wanted you to stop crying.”

There were words there on the tip of his tongue, but his lips had seamed together, but his throat had gone dry. Sam had told him to shut up, and he remembered then from months prior Bobby’s frustrated admittance that he hadn’t even been able to say Dean’s name for three whole years just because Sam had said. This power was his brother then, but this was his  _ brother _ , and all Dean wanted was to make his voice sound a little less sad, make his eyes a little less wet.

“So I left.”

And he shrugged like that was it, like that had been the answer Dean didn’t need to a question he hadn’t asked, but Sam had always been more, given more. 

“I left, and I went to college, and I  _ hated _ it. I didn’t want to go to class, and I didn’t want to eat, so I just stopped. And this girl, my friend, Jessica, she...neither of us were good, but we kept each other okay. We slept if we were in the same bed and we ate to get the other to, and it worked for three years. And then I-I told this guy in my access to justice seminar to take a leap and he did it, he just got up into the bell tower and threw himself from it. And I feel asleep at the library, and our apartment burned down with Jess inside and I couldn’t- fucking  _ Brady.” _

A sharp pull to his wide mouth, and Sam stared past him with those sun slit eyes, intent on the climb of buildings beyond the roofs spine where the city loomed far off. He focused on those like they couldn’t hurt him, like they couldn’t ask things of him, and Dean wondered just what his brother saw on his skin that he had to look away like that. He wasn’t even sure he really wanted to know. 

“I thought he was my friend.”

Citron, sardony, dead leaves, things that drifted from between his brothers teeth and cut paths across his lips, but Dean couldn’t catch them any more than he could move. A lift of his hips only resulted in Sam dropping his weight further, locking his knees, but Dean just wanted to touch him, comfort him. He just wanted to smear the self inflicted blood away from Sam’s lips, because there was enough stained into his own skin for the both of them, because Sam shouldn’t ever have to feel like that for all that Dean couldn’t protect him. 

But Sam locked his knees, and stared down at him then with those burning eyes, watched him with the same illuminated quiet that Dean remembered from a darkened car in the middle of the night with too empty bellies. A single hand lifted over his head then, caught in the back of his tank top and pulled until it came up and over his head, until it hid Sam’s face from view. And then there was nothing but skin, the sun gold soft of it and the silvery cut rope of his scars where they cut across his face, coiled about his throat and torso. 

A sharp knife drag just below his heart, a long, thick scarred gash that stretched low across his abdomen from hip to hip, the barbed wire laced around them and disappeared beneath his shorts, and Dean had seen these scars before. He had tasted them with his lips for all that he had never asked, because Sam had never offered to tell. Sam stared down at him half clothed and sun struck and sad, and Dean didn’t know what he could do. 

“I don’t remember falling asleep, but I remember calling you. Sobbing and scared, and then I was just in this basement. My head hurt.  _ Everything _ hurt, he’d tied me up in barbed wire and driven nails through both of my wrists and the tops of my feet. He had crucified me to a wall, and I didn’t even want to breathe, almost vomited from how much everything hurt. Even gave me a barbed wire crown.”

Elegant fingers carded through his just too long hair, pulled it from his forehead until Dean could see the scars he had only glimpsed, the very same that he had felt with every kiss he had given to Sam’s temple. Banded across his forehead just like the choke of them around his throat, and Dean wanted to smooth them with his fingertips, wanted to tell Sam he was alright. His little love was rueful though, walked the thin line of intentionally cruel, and it was a story that Dean didn’t want to hear, a lesson he didn’t want to learn. 

“And he kept mocking me. I thought he was just being a bastard,  _ where’s your God now, Sammy boy? You beg like a little bitch on your knees for him, but you’re just as much of a lost cause as me! _ I just wanted him to stop talking and let me go, or kill me, I just wanted to go  _ home _ . But I couldn’t go home, I couldn’t ever go home again because home was a person who didn’t want me.”

A protesting sound died in his throat, a violent surge of emotion caught in his chest even as it tore bramble snag sharp through his veins. A screaming in his own skull so loud that he wondered how his brother didn’t hear him, but Sam had told him not to talk, but Sam had told him not to move and he couldn’t even though he wanted to. Desperation sat just there on the back of his tongue though, a disastrous breed of possessiveness slow steeped into a cesspool of rage that seemed to never have a bottom had replaced his belly, his lungs, his bones. For he breathed the very same murderous intent that gave him its strength and Dean wanted to crush his brother against his chest just to make him stop. 

“He wanted to cut out my eye and keep it for a toy because it was pretty.  _ Unappreciative little bastards don’t get to be pretty, Sammy boy. _ But I was difficult, and he sliced open my cheek instead, decided it was too much of a hassle. So he wanted to cut out my heart, so he could eat it while it was still hot.”

Two fingers drew across the sharp, precise line that lay just below the throb in his little brothers chest, the very same that he had more than once in the past few weeks held Sam against him just so he could hear the pound of it. 

“ _ Can’t play right on a full stomach though, bad manners. _ God, his eyes were black, Dean, I’d been eating lunch and doing homework next to a demon for so long I didn’t know if I ever even knew the real Brady. And he pulled that knife down my chest, just sort of lightly drew it along my chest like he could do it all day. Asked me if I wanted to cry for my Mommy, for my pretty, stupid, dead friend, and he shoved it in here.”

That hand fell to Dean’s own hip, the crest of bone that Sam had mouthed at only days prior, and the path he made with them mirrored the deep scar across Sam’s own abdomen. 

“To here. I couldn’t stop screaming, and I was crying so much I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to die, I wanted to die just to make it stop. And then he said your name, and I must have flinched because the grin he got, it-there was nothing human there. And he started talking about how he thought your heart would taste, about how you’d scream and there’d be nobody to help you. Maybe he’d cut out your tongue, maybe he would carve your lungs and liver out of your body and make me watch.”

His chest heaved, his eyes glazed with a sort of remembered anger that Dean had only ever really seen in his own reflection, his he could move his fingers for all that he couldn’t quite catch his breath. 

“I wanted to kill him. I wanted it to hurt. How fucking dare he threaten you, who did he think he was? He wasn’t allowed to threaten you, to think he could hurt you. And then I was on my feet and there was- God, there was so much blood, and it was mine. It was mine and it was everywhere, but I couldn’t feel it and it didn’t hurt like it should have and I wanted to  _ hurt _ him.”

Sam hadn’t looked at him, hadn’t looked away from the heat shimmer skyline and there was a tightness around his eyes. His hands had fallen to Dean’s skin as he spoke, low on his chest and his fingers curled, his nails digging just enough that it ached, that it nearly hurt. And he remembered shattered glass and a subharmonic chorus of sound and Dean stared if only because he hadn’t ever been able to look away. 

And it was all worth it then, for Sam looked at him with such a curl to his mouth that it bared his teeth, with fire far brighter than the sun burning behind his eyes to send them backlit and eternally aglow. 

“I wanted his eyes because he’d tried to take mine, and they were gone, just like that. Just gaping holes in his head and he wouldn’t stop screaming, and his skin was burning even though I hadn’t touched him. And he just...this thick, dark smoke just crawled out of his mouth and his eyes, his ears, and it was like listening to somebody scream underwater.  And it was just me and all this blood and this body of a guy who should have been my  _ friend _ , and he, it smelled horrible, awful, like all the decay and rot on the inside had caught up instantly. I just wanted out, I just wanted somewhere safe, and I was on Bobby’s porch, and nothing hurt, but all the blood, I must have-”

Shaking his head, Sam pulled back enough and pressed both hands over his face, showcased the scars across his skin and the puncture wounds on the backs of his wrists. 

“I love you, so Goddamn much it hurts to breathe sometimes, but I can’t- this is what happens when you keep things from me and push me away to try to help me. I got down on my knees just as much as you did, and I don’t want you to save me, I want you to talk to me and work with me, Dean!”

His heart hurt, vice tight and pulsing between the too tight grip of Sam’s fingers, and Dean didn’t know if he wanted him to keep holding on or just let go. They were made up of nothing more than anemone then, of crocus and asphodel, cuscuta that clung to their tendons in little cluster blooms and clogged their veins until Dean felt dizzy from it all. Shackles of his brothers will at his wrists still, but he didn’t care, they didn’t matter, and the bones in his forearms burned as he forced himself upright, wrenched his hands from the roof to instead get a solid grip on Sam. 

And he caught his brother by his shoulders, threw his own weight forward with enough of a push that they tipped, that they slid across sun hot, rough grit shingles and Sam cried out even before his head struck the roof, even before their bodies started to skid across the top of it. But Dean dug his knees in even as he bared his teeth down at the love of his life, he kept them safe even as Sam’s head fell back at the edge of the roof and his little brother starred upside down at nothing but open air and the tops of trees. 

“ _ God damn it Samuel!” _

He couldn’t just say things like that, and Dean’s voice was a nicotine abuse rasp and sharp, curling with cutting edges and smoke haze thick. Sam lifted his head to stare at him then, and Dean wondered for a moment just how he sounded to his brothers ears, for the rest of the world seemed to shiver and shake with the boom of his voice. And Sam’s eyes were blown, nothing but thin rings of electric, glittering gold about wide pools of black, he was as beautiful as he was infuriating. 

“Why are you lik-”

“I’ve watched myself die every single night for the past two months, Dean. Every night, in the exact same way, in the exact same church. I couldn’t stop myself from screaming the other night, but I just- I get it now, I really get it, what you said in that church in Oregon? I’m going to die in one of those, and I know which one, and I know how, and I’m...I’m going to  _ die _ , Dean.”

Something wet, something small and sad and  _ scared _ seemed to have swallowed his little brother whole, had chewed up his cedar bones until nothing but wood chips remained. Dean wanted to keep him close just to try and hold him together, and Sam clutched at him with the same desperation that he had in the kitchen all those months ago. Like Dean would disappear if he let go, and he wondered just how long Sam had been keeping this from him, just how long Sam had been this scared. 

What had this world done to them?

How could this be what they were meant for. 

“Sammy,  _ no.” _

Because his baby couldn’t die, because Dean had only just gotten him back and he didn’t know if he would ever be able to learn how to breathe again without Sam taking up space within his lungs. And his hands curled behind his brothers head then, tangled in his soft hair and cradled him as close as Sam would allow. Nails dug into his bare shoulders though, Sam held him tight and demanding and Dean didn’t want him to ever let go. 

For there was something fever bright and delirium glazed in his eyes, and Dean already wanted to cry. 

“I’m going to die soon, and I need you to let me.”

 

-

 

Gilt edged archways, rich, warm wood pews that stretched and stretched, flickering votive candles over by the statue of Mary where she wept with a bowed head, glimmering stained glass. The smooth marble seemed cold beneath his feet, and past even the deep shell gather of the holy water pool where it stood, sacred and silent on its pedestal. The faint scent of herb smoke and a hush that sank itself all the way to his bones, everything about the church was quiet.

He hadn’t been able to sleep, midnight come and gone and his body no longer sun hot and burning. The two of them had clungs to each other in their frustrated grief for a long, long time up on that roof, but by the time Sam had begun to yawn, Dean had found himself still panic rattled and desperate. Because while Sam had grown used to the notion, Dean had only just found his brother once more, had only just remembered what it was like to have a beating heart. 

His fingertips hadn’t trailed along the curled shoulders of pews as he passed, nor had he stared up at the visage of Christ behind the altar like the tortured, bleeding man held the answers to all the questions he couldn’t find the right words for. He had never been a religious man, and against all odds, the world seemed to expect him to start now like such a want had never been missing in the first place. But there was no urge to fall to his knees, there was no desire to bow his head or avert his eyes, and Dean stared first at the amber stained glass window in the cathedral’s peak before his gave fell to the altar instead. 

He wanted to ruin it.

There was a sledgehammer in his trunk, kept there for cracking open mausoleums and bashing in walls. It would have broken the surface on the first hit, it would have bit deep into the smooth marble until it cracked and fell to pieces. He could almost taste the dust of it and he wanted, his fingers curling and his shoulders rolling.

Dean put both hands on the altar instead, palms flat and his fingertips gone white from the pressure. 

“I hate him.”

The firefly waltz of a summer haze dream, he could feel the otherworldly on the others skin now. He didn’t know how he had missed it before, how he hadn’t tasted the lightning, how he hadn’t felt the floods, it was all he knew now. But he was respectful, but he was quiet, came up beside Dean and held his hands clasped behind him at such a stereotypical soldiers parade rest that Dean would have found it amusing had he not been so pent up and burning inside. 

But he was familiar and he was friendly, and he had told Dean everything that he knew with such sincerity that Dean had never doubted a single one of his words. 

“My Father has his reasons, but I don’t find myself necessarily liking him all that much right now.”

He could hear parts of Sam’s diction in his words, he could hear parts of his brothers speech in his sentences, and that was such a strange thing to think about. How much time they must have spent together for an angel to pick up mannerisms, for a celestial being to take on human characteristics like they were normal to him. How endeared he must have become to allow himself to slip so. 

“You care about him.”

He couldn’t see Castiel beside him, but he knew those eyes by now, and he knew that low curl voice. There was a warm familiarity there that he hadn’t expected to find, and if he trusted the stretch in his own bones enough to contain his rage, he would have leaned into the comfort that the other offered. Instead, the two men stood side by side at the altar, the same one that Castiel stood behind every time he held service.

“He’s my best friend. I have loved the both of you like brothers for your entire lives, but I wasn’t ever allowed to make myself known. It was only when he came into himself that I was allowed to go to Sam. I was so angry with my Father that I was forced to wait so long, the two of you didn’t need to suffer so when you are already more than righteous and worthy.”

The night time dark kept the amber rose window from giving the two of them the same holy glow it had bestowed upon his brother. Fitting maybe, probably, Dean had never felt any bigger than his bones or any more than himself, never assumed himself destined for great things. His words were simply his own and he had never given them much thought, never thought that they would move mountains or change the course of fate, and he wondered how they expected things to ever change. 

They had only ever been two boys from Kansas, why did they have to be more?

“I’m going to kill your Dad if I ever get the chance, Cas. I murdered mine because of what he did to my brother and I, I’m not afraid to put God down too.”

Quiet around them, and it was the strangest thing, but he could have sworn he could hear the flicker of the votive candles back behind the holy water dish. 

“I will have your back, my friend, in whatever you decide to do.” 


	8. Black Poplar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was hanging onto this, and was just going to be an absolutely horrible person and drop the last remaining chapters all at once, but work has gotten out of hand, and this one was finished, so I decided I would go ahead and put it forward not instead. Enjoy!

Something the Winchester boys had learned early on in life was that food was important. 

Food mattered, not just in the traditional sense that it put something in their guts and gave them energy to run and climb, to hit and kill. Food meant something, because it meant they had a moment to gather themselves and just be them, just be boys. It meant that they didn’t have to be scared, they didn’t have to worry, they could be happy for however long it took them to sit on their tired asses and eat whatever food got put in front of them, whatever they could find.

They got used to half crushed bagged things with questionable expiration dates and stale coffee that had gone cold and soda pop that more than gone flat. Too many wrappers on the floor stuffed down deep inside too many empty bottles found in the footwell behind Sam’s side of the bench. But that tore at their stomachs until they felt liquid on the inside and like they needed to take a piss every twenty, but that left them feeling just as empty and hungry within an hour as if they had never even eaten in the first place and their gazes lingered on ever flicker flash embrace of curling neon they passed, sky gone dark signs flashing and the empty carcasses of cold engined trucks and cars loitering in their lots.

Food from a diner was a privilege.

Food from a diner meant they had money more than just the scraps of it they’d been able to get themselves or keep clenched in their fingers and hidden from John. It meant they could eat something past the questionable things they got at gas stations and rest stops when they could afford the moment, long enough to stop for more that just a gas fill, a body dump, an icey shower in a stream. It meant coffee, and quiet, and seeing each other smile all while listening to a sigh of relief, putting their backs down and their feet on solid ground that didn’t move with the purring rumble of an engine as familiar as the beating of their own hearts. It meant grinning past cups of coffee or bubbles from lips sealed around straws in glasses of cold water, food that kept them full for hours and an often friendly waitress that smiled at them like she wanted to rather than just because she had to.

It meant being  _ safe. _

Food meant everything.

_ Etta’s  _ felt just like any other diner in that respect, had everytime Bobby had ever taken the two of them there when they were too young to drive themselves and it did now just the same. At least some things never changed, at least the lights flickered sometimes and their arms stuck to the table tops where a waitress hadn’t managed to completely clean away all the spilt soda pop. It felt like the childhood they had only ever been able to have in fits and starts, milkshakes gone soupy and french fries too salty, watching his brother poke at his food like he wasn’t quite sure where to start even as their feet tangled together under the table. 

The center booth in the back had been unoccupied, and the light overhead hadn’t flickered like the one at the counter seats had. So Sam had pulled him there, fingers insistent and latched with his and Dean hadn’t had a single choice. Part of him had wanted to dig his feet in, part of him had wanted to say no, deny Sam for the first time in their lives and make a decision for himself for once. But he’d never been selfish enough for that, not with Sam, never with Sam and part of him knew he needed to start one way or another. Or they were going to lose footing because of this, or they were going to lose sight of one another because of this. 

Or they were going to die because of this, because he would never let Sam face death alone and Dean had been hopelessly in love since he was seventeen, and he followed his little brother through a familiar diner just like he would follow Sam to the grave. 

His jeans didn’t stick to the seat when he sat down, and the table wasn’t actually spilled sugar tacky for once and it didn’t try to keep his fingertips for itself. It smelled like fresh coffee in here, empty enough that he felt like he could breathe, and Dean watched the love of his life wriggle into the seat across from him. Their legs were too long and their shoes knocked together even as their feet tangled, or maybe they had just never had to learn what personal space meant, but Sam blinked luminous golden eyes at him and he wondered why he would have ever wanted to.

Personal space just seemed like another way to be without Sam, and Dean had already been down that road once before, he’d be damned if he did it again. He didn’t think he’d be able to survive like that anymore, not being able to hear his brothers laugh or kiss his smile, he could barely manage to call the way he’d drifted through the motions of breathing as anything other than just hanging on, just scraping by with most of his skin intact for all that he’d been hollow inside. But Sam expected him to try and find a way to live on without him now, expected Dean to just let him die, but Dean didn’t  _ have _ to do anything, not if he died first in whatever shitshow the universe had planned for them. 

He couldn’t watch Sam die if he himself were already dead, and he planned to keep it that way. 

Sam blinked fox brilliant eyes at him, and no waitress had come yet to take their orders or get them drinks, and there were bruises under his brothers eyes. Dark geraniums with their lesion colored petals that laid there beneath the flutter brush of his lashes, French honeysuckle made visible where that demon had carved his cheek in trying to take his eye, Sam looked as beautiful as he did troubled and resigned, and Dean didn’t think he’d ever seen him quite so heavy shouldered. He had never wanted to, had never wanted to know what that particular brand of defeat and acceptance looked like on his wide mouth and in the bend of his long fingers, but Sam couldn’t hide it now anymore than Dean could look away. 

How had they gotten to this point?

“You’re staring.”

He did and he knew it, eyes intent on his little brothers face with the pulsing, gnawing fear that this would be it, that this would be the last time. 

He’d woken up like that every day for the past week and a half, had spent every moment with Sam out of sight with his heart in his throat, convinced that every walk away motion would be the last. It felt like being twenty-two all over again and he hated it, breath an arctic knot in his chest and his lungs stained with the crackling, reaching fingers of that frost. Like drowning on dry land and it got worse the longer he looked, but he’d be damned if he looked away. 

“Get used to it.”

A harsh huff, a bastardization of the wheezing sound he usually made but Sam laughed all the same, one side of that wide mouth cut itself on a sardonic smile. But Sam watched him like he’d expected it, like he’d known that was coming, and it felt a lot better than he could ever describe to have someone else living in his bones again, but there was such a yawning chasm in his chest that he almost feared Sam would fall in. 

Sam didn’t seem afraid, and he wasn’t sure if it was a lack of fear or just a lack of common sense. He remembered that phantasm bright gleam in his brothers eyes when Dean had thrown him down on the roof though, and he remembered the rattling, high sound in the back of his throat that had threaded hysteria into every word he’d spoken. 

And he knew just what Sam would say, could practically hear it in the base of his skull, and part of him wondered when he would wake up in that copper rich scented basement with a black eyed Appalachian man grinning at him. 

“Careful, someone might get the wrong idea.”

He wanted to hold Sam’s hand, and who would stop him? 

Bobby never stopped him when he had work to be doing, and for all that the people here knew Sam, none of them had ever recognized him. He wanted to hold Sam’s hand as much as he wanted to shove his too long little brother into the car and take off down a backroad, the runaway routine that had sunk its teeth in deep as the first real habit he had ever formed. Take your brother and go, take Sammy and run, grab Sam and get the hell out, run, run,  _ run _ . Some things never changed, and instinct was a beast of an animal to try and fight against when it had been the only thing keeping him alive for a long time now. 

“Mornin’ boys, awful early to see your handsome faces.”

Tired eyes and tired curls, but there was a smile on Grace’s red painted mouth and a forever gentle kindness to her voice. And she was right, just now skimming past five am but Sam hadn’t been able to sleep, and Dean hadn’t been able to get him to stop fidgeting his legs long enough so the elder could try to drift off himself. So he’d taken Rosie out while his brother brushed his teeth, and Grace watched them with a bit of a yawn hidden behind her teeth and an order book in hand. 

“Rough night, ma’am.”

A low sound like she understood, and maybe it said something for how often they’d come in, for how normal they looked here when he had always wondered if they could ever manage to even really pretend to be. They’d gone soft somewhere along the line though, whether in the knit of their bones or in the kevlar weave of their skin, the half feral edge that had always made them so strange to others had slipped away enough that they were approachable, touchable. Grace soothed one red nailed hand through his hair though, a scratching drag that he leaned into despite himself and for all that Dean’s eyes went a little heavy, he could still see the slow melt sweet that bled into Sam’s smile. 

Only that single drag though, nothing more, and Grace patted a hand on the wide of his shoulder before tapping her pen against her order book. 

“Drinks? Earl Grey and coffee?”

He couldn’t find his tongue necessarily, a nostalgic flutter tight ache in his throat for a face he couldn’t even remember past the single blood stained picture that lived in his glove box. Painted nails in his hair and a wide mouth pressing kisses to his forehead and cheeks, but she was twenty-four years dead and he was twenty-four years cold by the butterfly effect she had left in her wake. 

Sam nodded though, just wide eyed enough like he always did when he spoke to people, earnesty and just self deprecating enough with a glaze of humble so thick that Dean wondered if Sam could feel it the back of his throat or if it was just him. 

“Please? And, um...”

“It’s Thursday, you just want the specials, sweetheart?”

She made it look easy, picking up where Sam had faded off, where his words had slipped away from him like they only ever did when his little brother sat distracted by something. Dean had always stepped into that silence like breathing, had never given his brother the chance to falter if he could be there to catch him before he could fall, but Grace just smiled that tired, patient smile like she had all day. Sam had never known that kind of maternal care, and Dean had done his best, but some things just couldn’t be emulated or replaced regardless of what he did. 

“Yeah, that’d be great. Thank you.”

“Thanks.”

She waved a hand at the two of them even as she wandered away from their table, and Dean watched the way Sam’s eyes darted around the diner on a quick headcount for the third time since they’d sat down. His little brother was unsettled, his best friend was on edge, the love of his life was nervous over something that Dean could feel fester dark bubbling in his own belly. There were liverwort on the back of his tongue though and they dropped their stems down his throat until they were all he knew. 

“Wrong idea like what, that I’m a creep?”

Long fingers and he knew what those felt like on his shoulders, his ribs, and Sam spread them wide across the table. Like he needed to brace himself, like he needed something under his touch to keep him grounded, and he wondered just how far up his little brother had floated on that cloud of resigned panic. He wondered how long he’d been up there on his own, and how long it had gone on that he hadn’t noticed. 

He didn’t think he wanted to know.

The heat wave that had poured through South Dakota on its last legs had finally left them a few days prior, and a frost had taken to the ground. All of Sam’s plants had been winterized, bulbs dried and put away and those still in the ground tucked in mulch after that frost had hit, and he felt restless in his bones now. He’d gotten used to sinking his fingers into the welcoming cradle of the dirt, and he’d gotten used to skimming his bare feet across cool grass, and while Dean had never thought he would get the chance to appreciate the lull of a domestic kind of life, he’d always been able to appreciate the quiet beauty of his brother. 

The lights were just bright enough and they set a honeyed glow across the top of his head, laid shadows across his shoulders that went liquid thick down the chest of his cardigan. Long in the body and a warm knit, a soft seafoam color gone dusky and just dark enough and his brother looked  _ normal _ . He looked like he belonged still on that university campus that Dean had pushed him away to just as much as he looked like he belonged on a park bench with a steaming cup of something in his hands, and all Dean knew was that he wanted to stitch himself into Sam’s side so neither of them would get lost or stumble and stray again. 

“That you’re in love.”

Sam had been built for domestic, for warmth and care and love, for things that Dean wanted to give him to the best of his ability for all that he wondered if he would fall short. Sam had laughter in his bones and summer tinged smiles for skin, and Dean wanted to press his hands full of the very flowers that his brother had made him fall in love with when he was seventeen. 

Because Sam was made to be loved, but Dean got to be the one who held his hand, and he was going to hold on even after somebody came by and torched their rose bloom bones. 

And God, he’d never been much of a religious man but he would take to his knees then if Sam needed him to. He’d never been on good terms with the man upstairs as far as he was concerned, but Sam had always cared about that sort of thing, and for all their supposed Heaven sent natures Dean had never felt that guiding hand between his shoulder blades before. He might have needed it now, sleep deprived and more than a little hungry and he might had needed something, but he only had the pulse of Sam’s heart branded against the tempo thunder of his own and that was more than enough.

That had always been everything, and he knew it always would be. 

“Loving you is a lot of things, Sammy, but it ain’t ever gonna be wrong.” 

He could probably kill a man with those eyes, and maybe he had. Holy fire set ablaze from the inside and glistering molten gold, his gaze snapped from where he’d been observing the counter to pin Dean in his seat instead. He had nothing to hide, especially not from Sam, and so his head tilted and Dean watched his little brother with a single raised brow. 

Because Sam looked an awful lot like he either wanted to bare his teeth and take a bite out of him, or like he didn’t know what he was supposed to say. Fitting then, it was fitting that vicious looked just as beautiful on his brothers mouth as overwhelmed did on his brow, and Dean was content to just watch him while Sam’s razor edged mind tried to decide if it wanted to pick that sentence apart or not. And he had all day, all the time in the world, the longer he kept Sam here in this semi-sticky booth meant the longer he had until God decided to tell the only person that had ever mattered that it was time to bow his head and die. 

The silence took them, carried on vented air that smelled like copious amounts of bacon and rich, fresh coffee, and it lingered long enough for Grace to leave them their drinks and a subtle wave of cinnamon perfume in her wake. 

“Dean-”

“Nothing you say is ever going to make me think otherwise. I’ve loved you my entire life, and I’m going to die loving you, regardless of what you or God have to say about it, Sam.”

Maybe he’d crossed a line, maybe he’d said the wrong thing. But he didn’t care, he’d spent his whole life saying the wrong thing and not doing enough, but he’d be damned if he let Sam get something stupid all tangled up in his head. And he had, or maybe he’d started to, but Dean watched with a spun sugar sweetness in his chest as a perfect, bashful smile took root on his brothers lips like it knew it belonged there. 

Sam smiled at him like he didn’t have anything else he’d rather do, as he leaned back against his side of the booth and sort of sank into it, head tipped and his shoulders loose for the first time in days while Dean bit at the inside of his cheek and wrapped a hand around his coffee. 

 

-

 

The Singer household didn’t have a kitchen big enough for this. 

More months spent here than he’d ever spent in a single state since their Mom had died, and Dean still hated this kitchen if only for the lack of usable counter space. He could set his cutting board next to the sink, and that worked well enough for how he wanted to slice the chicken into inch and a half thick pieces so he could lay them in the pan to be slathered with rosemary and honey, and that was good. But the presence of that pan then gave him little space to use the then clean cutting board to dice his potatoes and leeks, his carrots and beets for roasting, not with the microwave down at the far end and the coffee pot at his elbow. 

To make matters worse, he’d found three different canisters of the same ground pepper, but he couldn’t find the damn salt.

What kind of hunter didn’t have  _ salt? _

Hunters like Bobby, who kept their everything scattered around their booby trapped dens because they weren’t hunters anymore, just domesticated predators who had caged themselves. His luck, the salt would be somewhere in the desk in the study, or it’d be on Bobby’s bedside table, or maybe in that little cabinet thing he’d installed next to the front door that he swore was for books. Who put books by the fucking front door? He didn’t understand why there couldn’t just be salt in the kitchen like a normal, food eating person would have had it. Couldn’t properly season the chicken without it, the honey would make things too sweet, couldn’t roast his vegetables without it, the beets would just taste like vaguely appealing purple dirt and then Sam would never eat them. 

Sam, who’d taken up station on the floor near the table, between it and the wall that just had a bunch of old pictures and maps. Sam who sat with his legs spread and his feet bare, a warm woolen sweater with sleeves loose around his wrists because the kid complained more and more with each passing day about being cold. Dean could hear his fingers on Rosie’s fur, scratching at those spots behind her ears that she could just never manage to reach on her own despite how long her legs were. She’d grown distant over the last few days, the last few weeks, and while he’d hoped that meant Sam was getting better, he knew enough to know that it didn’t work like that. 

He couldn’t do anything but wait for the other shoe to drop and try to find the damn salt. 

Her claws scratched against the hardwood, the swish of fingers in her fur, and for all that Sam’s voice was too low to really understand Dean knew that tone, knew that curl of affection in his breath and the way he spoke around a smile. 

“What’re you makin’ dinner for, son?”

Ever steady with a knife, but he hadn’t heard Bobby come in. He’d gotten soft here, he’d gotten complacent and docile within his own bones, shit like that would get him killed. But this wasn’t John, he didn’t need to prove himself or run to keep up just to try and stay alive, this was Bobby and this was Sam and this was  _ home _ . A place where he could walk around with bare feet and lay in bed as long as he wanted to, where he would watch his little brother yawn into his morning mug of coffee or tea, home where Bobby called him son like he meant it, somewhere he felt safe. 

Because Bobby called him son and loved them like they deserved it, he made it look so damn easy, and every selfish breath that had made Dean the man he was never wanted to leave. 

“Potatoes were bout to start sprouting, few of the beets had gone soft.”

Quick, rolling cuts with his knife and the beets bled beneath his fingers. They left violet stains across his skin, purple rose petal bruises across his fingertips and pansy blossoms in his nail beds and no amount of soap would clean that up. He wondered if he would leave purple smudged fingerprints everywhere, he wondered if Bobby would see them on Sam’s skin. He wondered if he was supposed to care still, and he wondered why he didn’t.

“When in the hell did we get  _ beets _ ?”

Soft laughter, muffled and quiet and the wheeze of it no doubt pressed into Rosie’s fur, Dean didn’t think he would ever get used to the sound of Sam’s laughter. Happy his back was to Bobby though, safe even with his spine exposed and it was a way to hide his answering smile so he could instead keep it for himself, and he chopped off the greens to another beet and watched a fresh spill of violet stick to his fingers. Sam though, Sam laughed like Dean hadn’t heard him do in quite a few days, the kind that crinkled his eyes and wrinkled his nose and Dean wanted to kiss the way he knew that wide mouth would have split into a dimpled grin. 

“That farmers market that pops up over in the park on 12th street every Saturday? You wanted apples, so we got some last weekend and they had these, so we got some of them too.”

As if to prove his point, the hand that still held the greens lifted them above his shoulder and waved them a little bit. There was going to be beet juice on his throat, little flecks of it where he could feel the purple liquid splatter and he sighed, started to drop them back onto the counter. 

“We’ve got a farmers market?”

Bobby sounded so God damn incredulous that he couldn’t help but laugh, a chuckle that raced through his chest even as both hands planted on the counter. His knife was sideways, there were going to be beet stains on the countertop, but his shoulders shook and his head hung a little bit, and Dean gave his smile down to the diced vegetables and his half scalped beets. 

“Yeah. There’s this lady that sells maple syrup cotton candy, which still sounds amazing, but  _ no _ , Dean had to buy the purple dirt instead.”

Laughter in his throat, laughter on his lips, and there were peach blossoms on his tongue, red tulip petals along the roof of his mouth, he laughed just like he loved and it was warm and rattling. He let go of the knife to take up all the beet greens instead, clenched in a fist as he turned on his heel, as he found Bobby just in the doorway and Sam where he had thought him to be. Long legs splayed out on the floor, knees out and his hips loose even while he scrubbed his fingers in the silken fur behind Rosie’s ears where she could never reach. 

“They’re beets, Sam! Fiber, vitamin C, lowers your damn blood pressure!”

“They taste like  _ dirt!” _

A hard pull of his shoulder and the greens burst from their bundled ball against Sam’s face. They fell to the floor as he sputtered, as his hands flailed in the air for a moment to try and knock them away only to succeed to tangle one behind his ear instead. On the floor in front of him, a wag to her whip crack tail, Rosie took a green quick between her teeth and chewed on it while she watched her master struggle. 

“Yeah, thought you  _ liked _ dirt, Sammy? How bout you eat your fuckin greens?”

_ “Dean!” _

God, Sam’s voice was scandalized, indignant even with a fair bit of a scolding sound between his teeth. He’d forgotten what it felt to laugh like this, to watch that blush of irritation scald its color across Sam’s jaw, his cheeks. And somebody save him but he loved this man as much as he loved the boy that he’d once been. Looking at him hurt sometimes, a burnt sugar ache that left a sharp toothed glaze against his ribs with a kind of cut that had turned addictive somewhere in his teens. 

So he grinned, watched his little brother where he’d turned to trying to take the beet stems back from Rosie as if she hadn’t already eaten half of them. 

“They’re just beets, they’re fine for dogs. Won’t even give her the shits or nothin.”

A low snorting sound, laughter that Bobby tried to cover and it caught Dean’s attention, reminded him what he had needed in the first place. 

“Do I need to go raid your hunting supplies, or do you have salt stashed  _ somewhere _ in this damn kitchen?”

Sam had lost the fight against Rosie, or maybe he’d just given up to instead watch with a sigh as she ate all of the beet greens on the floor. He hadn’t even let his arms fall limp, instead he’d started to hold them out to her one by one to give her any of the greens that she’d missed, feeding her like she couldn’t feed herself. Dean remembered Flagstaff then, remembered the pump, pump, pump of terror slicing molasses slow in his veins because Sam wasn’t  _ there _ . He remembered the way his little brothers arms had pulled so tight around that dogs throat, how he’d buried his face in its fur. 

He hadn’t ever thought to try and pinpoint the moment that Sam had started to slip through his fingers, but that was probably it. 

“Course I got salt, kinda man you take me for?”

“I dunno,  _ old _ .”

A smack against his chest and Dean staggered back into the countertop a little, comfortable and amused even as a bone deep, nostalgic sadness tried to set in again. Bobby didn’t seem to notice though, or if he did he didn’t say anything about it, he instead walked past Dean to the coffee pot. 

“Idjit.”

“ _ Hey _ , I’m not the one that hides the salt!”

A snicker from behind him and Dean would have given his brother his attention had his curiosity not gotten the better of him. Because Bobby leaned a bit on the counter to be able to stretch himself up over the coffee pot and instead opened the corner cabinet that hung at about eye level and held things like coffee and too much sugar, coffee mugs. He grabbed one of the sugar dishes though, a stout little pot that Dean never used because of the one that lived on the table, and Bobby held it out to him with the stretch of the counter between them like that was normal. Like he had nowhere else to put the salt, and Dean just blinked at the man he’d grown up hoping and praying could have been their father instead. 

“Well, take it.”

He shook it a little, and Dean’s hands went out, slapped around the fat bellied, stout container before it could lose its lid. He lifted the top on it though even as he held it in one hand and sure enough, that was salt, little granules of it that sifted around when he tipped the small pot a bit. 

Bobby kept  _ salt _ in the coffee cabinet. 

“What kind of sick bastard are you?”

The man just grinned, all teeth and rounded cheeks and Sam snorted from his place on the floor. Bobby looked proud of himself, like he’d done something grand and wonderful and Dean wondered if this was why Sam had always nudged the little tub on the table at him when he groused about sugar. He’d never had the misfortune of putting salt in his coffee, but he didn’t want to try, not when everything still held that thin, fresh scar shine of being too new, too raw. 

“How else d’you expect me to fuck with Rufus?”

A dawning of horror in the back of his throat, but he laughed despite himself and Dean had to set the little pot of salt down on the counter to keep from dropping it. 

He needed to make food, he needed to get the raw chicken into the oven and finish his vegetables, but he could picture the betrayal on Rufus’ face every time he fell for it, the sound of it in his voice. That explained the shouting he heard occasionally when the other man came to visit, that explained the way that Bobby would look the most confounded and unimpressed. Hilarious and cruel all at once and he grinned, leaned a hip on the counter as he watched Bobby pull down the fixings to make himself a cup of coffee. 

Sick bastard indeed, and Dean wondered not for the first time what it would have been like to grow up here rather than in the back of that car, rather than in John’s suffocating shadow. 

Maybe he would have laughed more, maybe Sam would have eaten more. 

Maybe they wouldn’t have been so scared.

Salt across the chicken before he forgot, he topped it with long sprigs of rosemary and a healthy stream of honey before sliding the cast iron skillet they’d been laid into in the oven. Vegetables then, he needed to finish the beets so that he could slip that pan into the oven too, so he could try to scrub the beet juice off of his fingers and fail miserably. It felt comfortable though, soft cotton padded just beneath his skin and his bones lined with a sticky taffy, and Dean fell into the motions once more of dicing beets. The knife made quiet  _ thunk thunk thunk _ sounds against the cutting board and his shoulder picked up that gliding roll once more, just a little bit hurried if only from how he’d let his guard down, from how familiar the weight of a blade felt in his hand. 

Bobby was just past arms length away, immediately reachable if need be if only by extension of the knife for all that that would defeat any purpose he might have had. The sloshing of water being poured into the reservoir, a snap of a lid and the sudden rich, dark smell of coffee grounds in the air, the rustle of a paper filter before it was filled with too many scoops of grounds because Bobby liked his coffee strong enough it used to make Dean’s stomach turn. 

“Hey, Dad?”

He didn’t think he’d ever seen Bobby stutter at the coffee pot quite like that before. 

Dean himself had had a lifetime of getting used to that voice and it was that knowing alone that stood as the only restraint that kept his knife moving. He could hear Rosie moving around on the floor behind him, she’d eaten all the greens at some point then and he could hear the click of her claws on the hardwood. But he couldn’t hear Sam, hopeful, hesitant, probably mortified Sam because he knew how the kid got ahead of himself sometimes just like he knew how his head had been screwed on and Dean couldn’t take the bullet on this no matter how much he wanted to. 

The lid to the pot clattered down in place. 

“Yeah, son?”

Bobby’s voice was rough, thick with a kind of emotion he’d never really heard from the other man before, and Dean realized then just what this was. Sam had never done this before then, had never called him that and left fingerprint indentions deep on the yew and sorrel filled beat of his heart. And he wondered what had changed, he wondered what had turned that Sam had decided this was the moment, this was the time, but he knew better than that. This was it then, the kickstart to the ruin of it all. 

His knuckles had turned white around his knife. 

“You and Rufus should take that long weekend in Deadwood like you’ve been wanting to do.”

Someone had left the window above the sink open, just to his left and maybe they wouldn’t notice the way his heart wanted to crawl out of his chest and heave itself out of that window. He couldn’t take this, he hadn’t been built for something steady but he hadn’t been built to hurt like this. For all that God supposedly had plans for them, surely had hadn’t intended for Dean to go through most of his life feeling frozen waters slowly fill his lungs. He needed out of this building, he needed out of this skin, but he didn’t know how to both shed his bones and still keep Sam wrapped up in them at the same time. 

“You think so?”

Bobby turned around so he could face Sam where he still sat sprawled on the floor, and Dean caught the too wet sheen to his eyes and the way the kitchen light made them gleam. His voice was still a bit rough though, choked up and tight but he talked to Sam like he always did, gave the kid his full attention and listened like every word mattered. There were other people in the world who did that now, more than just him with his too tired body and his weary soul. But Sam had always done well with the right kind of attention, the right kind of encouragement and Dean had always wanted to give him more than he alone could manage. 

Sam had always deserved more, more food and more clothes, more stability and more reason to laugh. He had always deserved better, a house they could call their own and a father that actually loved him, things that Dean couldn’t give him no matter how hard he had tried. But for all that Sam deserved and for all that God had found him worthy of such love, Dean himself was a Winchester down to the bone, and Winchester men always ruined everything they touched. Little brother just hadn’t gotten the memo, or maybe he had, maybe Dean had taken all of the poison that their genetics had had to offer and left Sam with all the good. 

“Mhm. Cas said the numbers have been real good this month, he got a couple hundred on some scratch offs.”

“I still can’t get past the fact that he gambles.”

Slow words and rumbling laughter, the kind of sounds when Bobby pulled a hand back and forth across his mouth like he never seemed to realize he did and Dean needed a cigarette. He hadn’t smoked enough to deal with this, he wanted nicotine in his lungs and he needed something stronger still in his blood even as he dumped all of the vegetables into the greased pan. Salt and pepper and a little bit of thyme, the whole thing tossed into the oven with the chicken and he had selfish pennyroyal that begged to blossom along the electrified stamp of his nerves.

“He puts it in the offering box.”

Soap and hot water instead, he needed to clean his hands, and he turned from the sink and stepped past Rosie where she instantly started to nose at the floor. Just in time to see Bobby’s hand drop, just in time to watch the man lean back against the counter as the coffee pot started to drip, Sam’s eyes were brilliant. Golden, glimmering, fox sharp and wide with an expression Dean had only ever seen hovering in the edges, how could someone so young look both so hopeful and desperately resigned all at once?

“Ain’t gambling a sin?”

A hum and he knew that sound, he half expected to feel Sam’s fingers curl around his ankle as his little love tried to keep him in place. A holy embrace that had never been fair, that had always struck him to the core and he didn’t know what he would have done. But he didn’t have to know, didn’t have to think, because Sam let him go with little more than a flick of his holy fire bright eyes that never failed to watch him wherever he went. A comfort, Sam still just as scared to lose him as Dean himself but that didn’t help the panic bright nausea building beneath his diaphragm, he hadn’t ever done well with being scared. 

“I think sins are often forgivable, given the circumstance.”

 

-

 

Too cold to work out in the yard, a chill that liked to settle deep into his bones with the same sort of demanding sink that he wanted to use to dip his fingers down into the guts of that Dart. He needed to see what other parts didn’t work, see if he could find any that might be salvageable, and he’d managed to get the thing into one of the many garages Bobby had that littered the yard after hours spent rigging it up onto a trailer. He didn’t know how much of the body he could save, what he had previously thought to be a midnight kind of blue on the paint in some places looked like a soft robins egg in others. He didn’t know where to start, he didn’t know how much needed done or how much time he would now have to try and do it. 

He’d torn off both doors and the trunk, managing to slice his palm open on the second door and smear blood across the flared fin on the later half of the body. A little blood never hurt anything though, he would need to scrub the thing down to the rust and bone before it could be repainted anyway. Somebody would need to scrub it down, somebody would need to, because it wasn’t going to be him. 

A deep torn aching in his hand and Dean stared at the half hollowed shell that sat before him.

He wondered what it saw when it stared back, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. 

He’d taken to tearing a car apart then to compensate for all the ways he couldn’t rend himself to pieces at his ill-sewn seams, he’d never particularly thought himself the type to run from his problems before, not like this. But he felt as old as he did tired, chilled to the bone from an icy touch that had leached into his bloodstream with the death of that Indian summer and things were supposed to be different now, it wasn’t supposed to be like this anymore. He was supposed to be able to stop now, to lay his head somewhere that he could finally rest and take the weight off of his feet. 

Men like him didn’t get to stop, men like him kept their heads low and their eyes sharp, wayward vagabonds who knew how to shoot better than they knew how to smile. 

Blood slicked along the high arch of metal and he couldn’t see his breathe for all that it felt like he should have. Insides all twisted up and frozen solid so heavy his heart wasn’t quite sure how to hurt properly, but his skin felt like burning, but his head felt heavy with steam. He’d discarded his shirt on the other side of the garage, bundled up on the tool chest and out of the way, sweat beading down the breadth of his shoulders and the dip along his spine. It wasn't hot enough outside for this sort of feeling, but maybe it was the work or maybe it was his own frustration and the way it had turned liquid and started to run. Somewhere along the way he’d stopped caring, somewhere along the way he’d stopped giving a damn. 

But it was hot either way, his breath gone humid and his muscles filled with a familiar burning that he couldn’t get from hunting anymore. Almost as good as running, almost as good as punching something, beating in the face of a monster until its own mother wouldn’t have recognized it and he’d take this burn where he could get it. The adrenaline didn’t even taste the same anymore, but it tasted like Sam now and he wasn’t sure if he should complain, the floral grace of hemlock and the too pure quench of holy water something that he craved more often than not. 

Dean gave a low sigh and pulled a hand over his brow bone, his cheek and jaw where sweat had beaded. 

“Feel like lendin’ a hand, Sammy baby?”

“How’d you know it was me?”

Laughing quietly, a warmth in his chest and a velveteen crush in his bones and Dean turned enough to find his brother. Chestnut half curls and starfire eyes, a hooded maroon sweatshirt three sizes too big and Bobby had been gone for two days. His little brother wore boots now in this weather, no more bare toes in the grass and bare arms in the sun, his little brother covered his skin like Dean had never wanted him to do again but he didn’t want Sam to ever feel cold again, not like New Hampshire, not like Montana. 

“You move quieter than Bobby but you’re not used to stealthing in boots anymore. You gonna help me, or you here to look pretty?”

His nose curled, his fists jammed a little further into the pouch pocket of his sweatshirt and Sam gave him a grey winter sky version of his wild, dimpled grin. There had been baby's breath there once, there had been hawthorn, in the hollows of his cheeks and beneath his eyes, but life had had other plans. God had had other plans, and now his little brother’s cedar bones were laced through with wreathes of marigold.

“Don’t I always?”

Another laugh and he turned still, twisted on his heel and walked with the languid, slow roll of his hips that always seemed to catch those too bright eyes. It didn’t fail him this time, Sam’s gaze falling for a brief second to where his jeans hung low and Dean grinned, sauntered close enough that he could catch the younger by the waist. Sam went willingly, let himself be reeled in with a rose blush smile and hands that caught quick on Dean’s bare skin.

“Help me or look pretty?”

“Yes.”

There was something lurking in those eyes though, something dismal and spiraling, he knew too much and he didn’t have enough and Dean wasn’t sure how he was supposed to keep up. So his hand went to the marble carved cut of his jaw, so he cradled that face one handed so he could taste that mouth like he owned it even when he knew better. Because he belonged to those hands that skimmed across his chest to catch on his shoulders, he belonged to those flicker flame eyes and that ethereal beat heart. 

“Fuckin’ brat.”

His everything rested upon hemlock tainted breath and he pushed, caught Sam against the tool chest even as he scraped their tongues together and listened to his little brother moan. 

_ “Dean.” _

That hand at the base of his throat, fingers curling and he didn’t know Sam’s intent but his own moan was filthy, a surge of his hips and Dean watched those eyes go wide. But Sam had the advantage then just like he always did, he used that hold to keep Dean at bay and the elder hung on it, body tight and his blood burning anew. And God damn everything, but Sam looked so sad for all that he didn't want to.

Blood smeared beneath his unscarred eye and what a pair they must have looked with their flushed mouths and their bloodied faces, and Dean knew exactly what Sam had come out to say.

“It’s time.”


	9. Asphodel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One chapter left!

_ Palo Alto, California, Oberlin St., apartment 3A, the third floor with the door that old photographs showed had been blue. One bedroom, 915 square feet, west facing windows, basic security with a rot iron gate at the main entrance that locked from the inside and two tenants, male and female. The fire had originated in the bedroom, mal functioning alarms and what they could only assume had been a lit candle left unattended, potential intoxication due to how fast the flames spread. The entire unit burnt to the ground in minutes, reduced to nothing more than a smoldering pile of ash where the fire had sparked so hot it had eaten everything. _

_ It had eaten his heart, swallowed it up whole, and he didn’t have a damn thing to live for anymore. _

_ The officer had been so damn apologetic, tired in her brow and sad by the dip of her mouth, but he’d been a year too late and he hadn’t even known it. _

_ Sam was a year burned up and given some semblance of a burial that they could manage when what remained of the body couldn’t be identified, and Dean stared at the man who should have been his father with something gone cold flat in his eyes. Something had broken loose finally, something had snapped, twenty-six years running and something vital that should have beat around inside his bones had finally taken the hint and hurried up and died like it should have years ago.  _

_ He didn’t even know what he was supposed to care about now. _

_ He blinked, the werewolf took another swipe at John and slashed across his chest, and Dean contemplated just letting it kill him, eat him. _

_ “God damn it, boy!” _

_ That would have been easy though, it would have hurt certainly but then his hands would have been cleaner than he cared for. It would have appeased something to just let the beast tear his throat out before Dean put it out of its misery, it could have surely done even the littlest bit to cool some of that slick, hot rage that coiled within his bones. Oh, and it would have fed some of that hunger certainly, but that would have been easy, that wouldn’t have made John suffer quite like Dean wanted him to.  _

_ It was difficult to tell if that rumbling, thunderous sound was just the rage festering in his muscles or the monster he was supposed to hunt rather than the one he wanted to. Either, maybe both, he didn't know and he didn’t rightfully care, he didn't have the patience for this. It had caught John on the leg, possibly the side, just dark enough that he couldn’t tell and Dean fired a single silver bullet into the side of its skull, tore through its temple before it could scream. It just dropped instead, dead weight heaped in the wet grass and he wasn’t sure who went down harder, it or John.  _

_ The werewolf was bigger, larger bones and more muscle mass by far but John weighed more, broad shoulders bogged down by unquenchable alcoholism and unmet expectations, child abuse and the parade of starvation and abandonment and terror that followed suit. It all fell heavy on his shoulders, dragged him down into the mud with a wet slide and pained sounds like he belonged there bleeding and filthy. Dean watched him crumple and he stared, his hands steady and his belly tight coiled hot for all that something at the edge of his teeth held the flood just barely in check   _

_ The rapid pull of his breathing meant fear, and John deserved to be scared. _

_ John deserved to suffer. _

_ “Fuck, Dean-” _

_ A click as another round slid into the chamber and it would be a waste of bullets, more silver that he would need to smelt down himself but that was little concern right now. He could dig them out later if he cared that much, but that would be effort where it wasn’t due and Dean didn’t have time for that. All the time in the world and never enough, there wouldn’t be any more time to make Sam smile, no more chances to make him laugh. _

_ “Shut up.” _

_ Dead men couldn’t be beautiful anymore, not like that, not like Sam had always been and should have been still. John had taken that degree of delicate almost from him, from them, stripped the possibility from Sam’s ashen bones and Dean’s bloodied hands before he’d even had a chance. He had destroyed something beautiful, even inadvertently as it may have been, but logistics meant little when Dean simply wanted to take. But nothing about John had ever been beautiful, and Dean would settle for simply destroying him instead. _

_ “What did you just say t-” _

_ Maybe then they’d be the matched set that John had always tried to force him to be. _

_ He’d never heard John make a sound quite like that, scream quite like that, but it felt like he’d dreamed about it for years now even before all of this. Before the fire that took Sam, before Stanford, before getting left behind and wondering what had happened to his father but Dean didn’t dwell, watched instead the way John rolled to his side and tried to clutch his bleeding hand to his chest. The bullet had gone clean through that dip just above his palm, that one at least would be easy to collect for later use, and the boom of the pistol still rattled around in his ears. Labored breathing, shoulders shaking but Dean planted his foot on one, kicked hard and forced John onto his back once more. _

_ “Dean!” _

_ “Shut up.” _

_ Another scream, he’d always wondered in some dim, off hand fashion what it sounded like to take a bullet to the shin. It was good to have that curiosity sated but there was something dark and wet and hungry yawning its way to wakefulness just beneath his skin. Dean stared though and watched John writhe and bleed, watched as he bared his teeth in pain. _

_ “He’s dead. The only one of us worth a single fucking thing and he’s dead because of you.” _

_ Maybe it was the pain or maybe it was something else, but Dean watched that tooth bared grimace as it seemed to stretch back into a grin. His knife sat comfortable and body heat warmed at the small of his back and he wanted its weight in his hand instead, wanted to pull the sharp metal kiss of it across that muscled throat just so John stopped fucking talking. _

_ “Fuck you smiling about.” _

_ He’d wanted to do this for years but he’d never thought he’d get the chance. Too tangled up with keeping his head down and keeping Sammy safe and for what? A homicidal curdle lodged deep in his blood that seemed content to cling, Sam was dead and he may as well have been, felt like it. Should have been. _

_ “Somebody finally decide the little bitch wasn’t good enough on his knees?” _

_ He had thought that the war drum pulse of his heart and the seeping sludge were as demanding as his anger would get. Like he’d tipped past the edge enough that his fire had gone cold, predator sharp and lethality quietly contained, like he could play with his kill a little bit.  _

_ But John knew. _

_ John knew and that changed things, because John had known then the lengths they had been forced to go to just to feed themselves, to keep themselves safe. He surely knew the way they’d both watched the world with something too guarded and why Dean only ever slept with his back to the wall. Anger was an all consuming wild fire that tore through his muscles, that ate at his marrow and flashburned his bones until his whole body turned molten with it and he revelled in it, moved with it as he fired another shot into the tense muscle of his abdomen and watch John’s body try to bow out of the mud. _

_ He would have worried about the screaming had they not been so deep in the woods, the gunfire had they not been so far from even the cars and instead Dean dropped, fell with a knee planted firmly in John’s chest so he could stare the man in the face. He wanted to slit his throat, he wanted to watch him bleed but Sam had never liked blood and he couldn’t dirty himself like that, he couldn’t, he wouldn’t. John didn’t deserve the privilege of taking that from him too. _

_ “Fuck you!” _

_ Blood on his thigh from where John tried to grab him, a bullet in the man’s forearm but Dean couldn’t tell if he laughed or screamed for the sound was wild and stuttering. But John knew the things he’d had to do to try to feed them, to try to give Sam somewhere safe to sleep and he knew then the very same things that Sam had done to try and save Dean the burden. Dean wanted to see how far the barrel of his gun could fit down John’s throat, and he just wanted his Dad back. _

_ John grinned at him with bloodied teeth and the man who should have been his father had abandoned him a long, long time ago. _

_ “You did everything I told you like the perfect little soldier, and he ran away from you. He hated you, and now he’s dead, Dean. You killed your little brother.” _

_ Red neon in a parking lot in the southern Louisiana rain, water turned to blood and steam billowing from the pavement. The curl of Sam’s shoulders, the wide of his eyes, the way his whole body had flinched when that duffle had hit him in the chest. The set of his jaw and the way he’d been soaked through, how he’d turned on his heel and marched out of that lot like he couldn’t get away fast enough. _

_ “Go to Hell, you son of a bitch.” _

_ John’s grin seemed to widen further, and he laughed with a wet, reedy, hissing sound that Dean had never heard before. It didn’t matter as his thumb pulled the hammer and he squeezed the trigger, as the sickly cackle of his laughter burned out beneath the boom of a silver bullet wasted, lodged between his eyes point blank. He would never forget the wet sound it made, the crunch of the bullet against bone, the way John’s eyes had instantly gone flat and how those hands grappling at his legs had fallen back into the mud. Life snuffed out, all fight gone and there was a strange, bubbling sound in the air that he didn’t recognize for a minute.  _

_ Sobbing, he’d started crying, and Dean snarled down at the corpse of the man who should have cared as he cried with the same heartache and desperation that he had back in California. Unsure if he cried for himself or if he cried for Sam, but there was such a rage for all that he despaired until his tears tasted acid bitter and sharp. Gun on his chest then, John’s head rolled limp as Dean punched him in his slack jaw once, twice, enough times that he lost count and it wouldn’t do him any good, those glazed eyes staring at him.  _

_ “Why couldn’t you just love us?” _

_ But John didn’t answer because dead men couldn’t speak, and Dean sat on the chest of a corpse as the last living Winchester and cried out his grief to the mud and the rain. _

 

-

 

Head tipped low and his hands in his lap, effervescence in his blood where the soft crinkle crush of oak leaves didn’t seem to know that they should have turned brittle and sharp edged with panic by now. Like he didn’t have it in him to panic anymore, like his body didn’t quite know how past the caramel and cashmere sensations that it had learned. He had spoiled himself, turned the titanium and seaglass of his insides into nothing more than satin and lace until every breath he breathed carried baby’s breath and daisies. Nothing more than lies that he had convinced himself of, but it had been temptation impossible to resist and he’d tipped himself into the rabbit hole. For beauty was a laugh, and peace was a crinkled nose, happiness the way that a luminescent smile soothed the beating of his heart, but he should have been fretful, should have been afraid. 

His bones would break and his soul would bend, there would be no coming back from this sort of torturous sensation and God, but he’d thought himself ready for this, had felt it building for months. Something like fire in the back of his throat, something like forgiveness gossamer soft beneath his skin and oh, but that should have been enough. He would choke on the red frills of pomegranate flowers by the end of it all, he could feel them clogging his lungs for all that he couldn’t seem to force them to wither and wilt like he so desperately needed. Nothing would be well here, nothing would be sacred nor safe, and for all that he had known he would go to Hell he had never given thought to the possibility of dragging his brother down with him.

Because he knew the phantom feeling of his tongue being torn from his mouth, and he knew the feeling of his ribs being snapped one by one, and he should have found a way to just come alone.

He’d never wanted Dean to see him like this.

Slowly like he didn’t want to be seen, like he just wanted to go back to a home he could never return to and his hands curled together in his lap. Fingers pulled up into fists and they caught in the cuffs of his soft, pale rosy sweater, pulled it to his knuckles and for all that he knew it would be ruined, he’d just wanted something comforting against his skin. His brother stood just within reach and he could see him from the corner of his gaze, hardened shouldered and hardened eyes, body weighted with a familiar sort of armament that looked fluid upon his frame, Sam had always been selfish. There would be payment demanded for that now, there would be blood spilt, little importance would be given to his own care now that the slow curl of eternity had been set in motion once more. 

He didn’t want to die, but he couldn’t find it in his bones to panic like he should have, and Sam stared down at his lap instead with a belvedere molasses slow blink.

“It’s Cas.”

“What?”

A popping sound from beside them like his ears used to make when Dean would speed them through winding mountain roads, the harsh pull of a gun as a bullet hit the chamber, the primal dancers grace that fit his brother like it had never fit him. Sam had always been meant for better things, lesser things, a calling he hadn’t been able to ignore even if he’d never properly heard the words and a tight sick roiling beneath his skin that he’d never been able to drown out for all that he’d tried and tried and tried. 

“Sam, Dean, there are-

“God  _ damn it _ Cas!”

“-demons in town and I can’t get to them.”

Soft amber golden light, the rose window high above the altar had been done in shades of burgundy and gold, curling stained glass that fell in precious metal and jewels upon his unworthy skin. This would be the last time in this church, this would be the last time with these two men, both his lover and his brother, his best of friends the both of them and he just wanted to sit here a moment, just wanted to have this. He had always been so sickeningly selfish. 

“He won’t move.”

Dean, hard voiced, a low whiskey gravel pull to it that had never failed to spark a fire in Sam’s blood, the calling siren song of osmunda and the small, encroaching blossoms of milfoil. His brother had always been this vision crafted from spilled blood and fever dreams that Sam had wanted to lick from his teeth until he tasted him when he breathed. He was quiet now, turned to stone and to tree and to earthen shelf now and Sam had never seen him quiet like this for all that Dean had always been a predator swathed in leather and a smile. 

His heliotrope voice sounded so resigned beneath that stovetop simmer of anger, and he had put that there, he had caused that. 

Sam had never wanted to upset his brother so, not when all Dean had ever deserved was more laughter and sunlit love than Sam could ever hold in his hands to share. 

“What do you me- Sam, we don’t have time, we need to go.”

He’d never seen that particular expression on his friends face before. A blessing then to know that he could evoke such emotion in a being so holy, for his eyes were wide and his mouth downturned, and Cas looked between the two of them like he wasn’t sure what to make of the situation. Ivory and gold two headed lions, greaves with fingertips pulled to a point and it smelled like the cleansing holy fires of forgiveness whether from the hollow heart of his sheathed sword or the swirls of it that danced from his fingertips, piety everlasting and Castiel burned. 

“No.”

The first he had spoken since they’d entered the church, the first word that he’d managed to find the strength to say since his feet had guided him to the altar and he had fallen to his knees. Like his will had simply left him, like the fight had seeped its way out of his flesh and bones after all the years that John had tried to beat it from him, but Sam wondered how much of the fight had ever really been his to begin with. The church was still around them, dust motes that sifted through the golden glow of the air like the faint summer yellowed fall of acacias and tulips, Dean’s grip tightened on his gun while Cas stared at him as if struck. Six sleek wings that dripped Heavens Gate gold and he expected drops to fall to the floor, little shimmering splatters. 

“What do you me-”

A blink, a sigh, a soft fluttering pop of air and he was alone with his brother then. 

Alone with the only person who had ever really mattered for all that Sam had done his absolute best to love others like he should, to care. Difficult to put forth effort when he had only ever felt stretched then for all that he had wanted to care, for all that he had wanted to help and to love, for people deserved to smile without fear and hold the hands of those they held dear. But Sam had grown tired somewhere between five years old with his first John shaped bruises and twenty-four with the scars that stitched his skin together, it was hard to love like he desperately wished he could when the world stood ready to tear apart the only thing he had ever wanted to keep to himself. 

This world expected so much from him, so much from  _ them _ , and Sam couldn’t help but wonder if anyone had ever thought to ask if they might have wanted this. 

“Sam?”

Dozens of them, hundreds, his brother’s freckles looked like the wild spark electric dust that followed immediately after a firework boomed and they had been slathered thick across his face. He used to want to kiss every single one of them when he was younger, when his brother was ten foot tall and beautiful. Puberty had swept him up hard then, he’d seen the way that Dean had tried to shoulder all of their burdens then, his brother had seemed less like a hero and more like a body he could lean on then, a hand he had wanted to hold. He counted his luck in those freckles now, his blessings found in the starlight on his older brothers skin but his days had been reduced down to minutes and there would be no more luck or blessings to help him now.

Heaven help him, but this was exactly what God had planned for him. 

“Sam, what did you  _ do?” _

Exasperation, like he couldn’t even find it to be angry, like he’d expected something like this, Dean’s voice seemed to carry, seemed to dance through the flames of the votive candles and send them flickering on their wicks. That voice could command armies, a simple world could crumble nations, but Sam had seen him steal the hearts of people less than deserving with a few humble words. His brother held the power to influence the masses with nothing more than a scattering of choice words and the Prophet was he for all that Sam had never thought to see it before. 

“I sent him home.”

He just wanted to keep a single good thing to himself for once in his life.

A sigh, barely restrained and he could feel it in his bones, brambles that he could feel clogging his throat and red columbines in his lungs, Sam wasn’t sure if he wanted to cry or scream. He should have been resigned to this, prepared as he had thought himself to be, expectant as he should have been. But Dean had already seen so much and Sam didn’t want to hurt anymore, they should have run, they should have run. Fitting that he couldn’t avoid the inevitable anymore than he could avoid a love he must have done something to deserve, and Sam smiled for a want to sob. 

“Sam-”

“I love you. You’ve been the best brother I could have ever had and the best friend that I could have ever wanted, you made every second of this life worth it when all I wanted was to give up, and I wish you had just stayed home.”

Silence, silence like he didn’t know what to say but Sam knew better, Sam knew him better. Dean always had words for something even if they weren’t the right ones, even if he held onto them longer than he should have with an iron fist and clenched teeth. Dean had never let him down before, and Sam didn’t expect him to start now, his brother couldn’t ever be anything less than human and his no matter how hard they tried. 

A hand in his hair, fingers sliding as they sifted through on a slow sweep before that hand slipped low and curled around his jaw. Before Dean used that single hand to tip his head back even as he felt his brothers knees against his back, and Sam went willingly. Pliant in those Devil’s dance calloused hands, back and back until he could see his brother with his incense haze cut of muddled, mossy eyes and the proud cut of his nose, Dean pressed their mouths together like he had the right, like he owned Sam and he did, he did, he did. 

“There ain’t no me without you, Sammy.”

That kiss burned, cleaved a path through him straight to the very glimmering, cursed, golden soul that resided in he hold of his ribs and Sam sighed. 

Hands in his lap still, his weight resting on folded legs, there was a fire inside him just as there was a fire at the door, a brimstone and rot trail of it that he could feel chew through his bones, Dean’s eyes were sharp and his voice steady. 

“I love you, Sam.”

Fire in his blood where it began to acid curdle, in his marrow where it had started to mold, sulfur sickly and desecrated grave demanding, they didn’t have time. No time, never enough of it, he’d never really even had the chance to get used to what it felt like to breathe for the first time in his life. He just wanted to hold Dean’s hand, he just wanted to feel his brother wrapped up in his breath and in the rhythm of his beating heart, he just  _ wanted _ .

But his will had never been his own, and Sam didn’t know why he had ever expected anything different as the door to the church kicked open and the fires inside tried to climb free from his mouth. 

“Is this incest I smell, in a house of God?” 

Low, slow, a dirty grinding rumbling sound that spoke of too much alcohol and too many cigarettes over years spent in bitter isolation, he knew that voice like he knew Dean’s and he knew the soft of Rosie’s fur beneath his fingers. He watched Dean’s pupils constrict, nothing but green against a pinhole of black while that voice tisked at them, while that mouth made a sound he’d never once heard from those lips but he nearly flinched all the same. 

“Daddy dearest must be just beside himse- oh. Oh that’s right.”

He could have died without ever knowing this cold bramble rush in his blood.

“Big brother put a bullet right between his eyes. Mh, you should have heard the sounds he made in here, the way he screamed and begged. The stuff of magic, really.”

Dean’s hand on his throat, on his jaw, fingertips that promised bruises because his brother never managed gentle quite right no matter how much he tried. He couldn’t see who had joined them but he didn’t need to, not when he knew that voice, not when he knew that hysteria laced anger that bloomed like an anemone garden in the moss dark of Dean’s eyes. He wouldn’t live long enough to feel the pressure on his jaw seep overbearing love sweet into bruises, but he knew his father’s voice just like he knew Bobby’s. 

“I put you in the fucking ground.”

Words spoken so low past gritted teeth that Sam worried they might break apart beneath the pressure, but his brothers head had lifted and that diamond sharp edge had taken that delicate rosebud tender that Sam had worked so hard for. And Dean didn’t let him look, not at first, hand clasped at his jaw just right that he couldn’t lower his head but he could feel the panic thrum of blood within that hold. He couldn’t see and he wasn’t sure he wanted to, but Dean had faced every one of their demons alone thus far in their life and this wasn’t fair. 

“You put John in the ground, little soldier boy. All you did was finally leave me with this perfectly good sack of skin all to myself.”

He couldn’t let Dean take this too.

“You’re  _ dead _ .”

Over six foot tall and wide in the shoulders as he had ever been, John Winchester would have looked good for a dead man if not for the claw shred of his torso and the bullet wounds, the blood that had dripped so long ago it had turned black with rot. He reeked of it, the same smell he’d never been able to properly place that had wrapped itself up around Brady and he knew better now, Sam knew better this time and he could give a name now to just what that sour, acidic heavy on the back of his tongue was. He’d never thought or known for all that it had followed John for his entire life, and Sam wished that he didn’t know, sickly decay and pooling fetid spoiled milk curdle that liked to choke him, it wasn’t John.

“Dean.”

Voice a whisper, quiet and Judas tree withering with a sound that Sam couldn’t take back because it had never been John from the very beginning. 

Bloodless lips cracked further when the thing that lived in their father's body smiled like that, too wide with too many teeth that gleamed in the pale honey amber light of the stained glass. Blood so old it had blackened looked muddied beneath it and Sam would have believed it to be such had he not recognized that particular deathly pallor. Hadn’t seen the burnt flesh hollow of a bullet hole between eyes that held a corpse cold glaze to them, a bloodless face and the bullet wounds that had bloomed blackened once red across his predators body, the torn open of his middle. 

John hadn’t been John for a long time, and Sam wasn’t sure he wanted to know just what wore that skin now even as he mourned the father he had never had the chance to have. 

“Little Sammy gets it. Stubborn little Messiah that just wouldn’t die when he should have.”

Slow motions, purposeful, Dean uncurled from where he’d bent himself over Sam’s kneeling form and there was something commanding and holy in the rosebay and yarrow unfurl of his body that Sam wished he could savor and worship like his brother deserved. His hands curled into fists on his thighs instead, a willow sweep of rage come to life within his chest that he couldn’t swallow down. 

The cock of a gun behind him, familiar sound like a lullaby hum in the back of his throat and he wanted to lean back into it, could almost feel the burn of gunsmoke in his lungs. Dean had taken his stance then for all that Sam wished he hadn’t come, an answer given without words that only made the demon in their fathers skin smile wider. His jaw looked like it could crack open with it, like it had readied itself to unhinge and split clean in two at will, viper pleased and tar bog consuming. 

“You want to shoot me again, boy? Put another bullet in Daddy’s bones?” 

Glistering black for eyes then, the same obsidian sheen that had consumed the blue of Brady’s and he felt the violence in his brothers skin coil further. 

“I’ve waited over a thousand years to rip the soul out of this boy's body so I can finally chew on it. You won’t keep this from me.”

A seismic swell in his chest, something all too big for his bones and Sam tasted the razor edges of raspberry leaves cut the back of his tongue as the demon snarled. As its lips pulled back, as he felt the shift of motion that meant Dean had raised his gun and there was fire behind his eyes that turned everything umber edged and too far tilted. Copper on his breath, the curdle burn of it in his throat, the distance muffled screams of the forever dying and eternally damned that rang in his ears and there was a name there, there was a knowing that tasted of horror and sacrifice, malice and childlike cruelty. 

“Alastair.”

Like a gasp on his breath but it tasted of familiarity, of finality and Sam watched the way the demons teeth clenched together, heard the sharp suck of its breath. Watched its head roll, heard the corpse that was his father’s neck crack and he’d said too much, the battle had begun before he could even get to his feet with time enough to banish his brother like he had banished his friend. For Alastair looked far from pleased, Sam recognized that expression even if he didn’t know those eyes and he could feel the cold grip of dread pull up from his abdomen once more. 

“You always were too smart for your own good. Should have ripped your slimy little tongue out when you were eighteen and thought you could get away from me.”

Pressure gone on his back then, no more blood iron strength and there sat the altar instead, the quiet misery of Christ who had died before him, Dean stepped around him instead. Elder brother with elder bones and Sam had never been quite fast enough for all that he had tried. Dean stood between him and what would be the final monster then, the self sacrificial lamb when Sam had only wanted to try and keep him safe. But it hadn’t worked then anymore than it would work now, and he surged to his feet even as his brother stalked forward with pomegranate blossoms in his wake. 

As the demon just smiled. 

As Alastair met his brother half way with outstretched arms in the kind of welcome that they had never known from the likes John. 

“Dean!”

Laughter, his brothers arm pulled back like he’d meant to hit the demon in the jaw with the butt of his gun, but Alastair had caught it easy and his teeth gleamed in the light, John’s bloodless skin dead and past pale. A single shot fired up into the rafters, his brother let loose the gun to take his bowie from his belt and it was like watching the worst part in a movie when everything he’d ever cared about started to unravel just out of reach. For every cut of Dean’s arm and predatory motion of his body was lesser than they needed, far from what his brother had hoped and he watched as Dean’s mouth pulled in a snarl, as the firebrand of his temper began to overtake him. 

Gun tossed to the floor by a demon that didn’t need it, and Sam watched as Alastair leaned out of range every time with a fluid sway that he recognized. Because their movements became a feral sort of dance, ferocity in his brothers shoulders and a maniacal amusement laced through their fathers second hand skin, it was like training. A familiar mouth feel that made bile burn in the back of his throat and Sam rotated around them, did his best to stay out of arm's reach even as his desperate hands wanted to take up the discarded gun where it lay between the pews. 

“You think you can kill me? I taught you everything you know, boy, shown how to hunt by the hands of the torturer of Hell himself. I made you!”

“Shut  _ up!” _

Worn grip, warm still to the touch, a single shot spent, the gun was as familiar as the man who should have held it instead. Alastair’s mouth fell open wide, a deranged, pleased moan of a sound garbled from between dead lips, a knife cut angled and quick across a cold throat and their dance had ended just as quickly as it had begun. But the wound didn’t bleed for all that the demon seemed more than pleased, tipped past the point of irritation and it was only with the lack of it that Sam realized the demon had been amused. It caught Dean’s wrist instead, twisted until Sam heard a snap that lost its weight instead under the way his brother screamed, the way the gun kicked back when his finger pulled the trigger. 

Another bullet in its head, planted hot and smoking through the side of its skull and still it didn’t bleed. It yanked his brother close instead as Dean panted in pain and reached for another blade that wouldn’t do him any good, as Sam’s feet sealed to the ground and the sharp sour of sulfur wrapped around his throat and held him in place, took his breath. 

“Do you have any idea how disrespectful it is to talk to your betters like that? And here I thought I’d raised you better than that, boy.” 

The votive candles snuffed out one by one, lights quivering overhead as they too flickered out like their wires had been cut, as Dean’s legs kicked out and Sam wheezed where he had been frozen in place, as Alastair spoke with their fathers dead mouth. 

“Look at your brother, Dean. Scaring little Sammy, still can’t keep your brother safe but you can suck his cock, can’t you?” A single hand on Dean’s jaw turned him enough that he could see the fury bright of his eyes once more, the pale of his cheeks and the flat pull of his mouth where the pain had pinched his expression just as much as his rage. Alastair crushed his nose against Dean’s jaw, his mouth pulled against his brothers skin and Sam watched Dean snarl, watched his eyes narrow. “I should just take your tongue.”

A threat like he meant it and the air around him tasted like intent, turned rich and dark with something so foul that Sam could feel the burn of it on his skin.

Primrose delicate and soft floral sweet, cloying in his throat as he watched his brothers green eyes bloom terror wide. Black cloud swirling in the amber light tinged world that felt ready to collapse down upon him, Dean screamed plenty for the both of them where the demon smoke clogging Sam’s lungs would barely let him breathe. Alastair’s hand filled his brothers mouth but Sam had known the sound of his brother choked off and screaming since he was twelve years old, blood dripped down Dean’s chin with the wet rip of flesh, he couldn’t move for all that his brother clawed at that single hand that held him aloft by his jaw. 

He didn’t think he’d ever heard his brother sound like that, blood bubbling pain and a pure, nearly hysteric kind of agony that tangled in the rafters and echoed off the altar. Blood slick and dripping, Dean’s tongue hit the floor just before his feet with a liquid smacking sound. Alastair gave a harsh, jagged laugh while Sam watched him lick the fresh spilling blood from his brothers slack mouth. Desperation felt like a hell of a drug, sent his body molten from the inside with a want to take Alastair’s eyes like he had taken Brady’s, to take his hands in payment for the damned creature that thought himself worthy enough to touch what belonged to Sam. 

He lurched forward as much as the smoke chain binds would let him, he couldn’t get his hands to work on Dean’s favorite gun, he couldn’t do much more that give a jittering jerk of his shoulders forward. The only person that had kept him breathing through the voices in his skull and the loneliness in his bones had muddled moss eyes that stared past him, trauma glazed like Sam had never wanted to see them and a pain delirium mouth that hung open and loose, blood dripping and tongueless. A symphony in his bloodstream, tidal pooling and celestial pull consuming and he could feel the way it threatened to burst free from within the flashfire yarrow of his ribs, Dean was hurt, Dean needed him.

He wanted to rip the breathing sin out of the demon with his bare hands.

Visceral and roaring, pulse pound of a kind of rage he’d never known the mouthfeel of before, that screaming was him, that sound was his. A gunshot plume of demon grip smoke expelled from his lungs and that was him, hand moving because he didn’t need a gun for the sort of damage he wanted to do, not when he could see the blood draining from his brothers face. Sam had never felt more hellbound for all that Castiel swore he was holy and he didn’t care at this point, damn this church and fuck these people, he wanted his hands on Dean’s skin and he wanted his nails buried in the oil slick that held the demon together. 

“ _ No!” _

The cathedral around them seemed to swell with the sound, glass creaking and the heavy doors shuddering down the aisle, curling fingers and Alastair choked. And his tar black eyes went wide as Sam snarled, as his insides felt fit to burst and he closed his fist and  _ tugged. _

A punch of black smoke bubbled from between John’s dead lips, gargled out and he couldn’t tell who made that sound, Alastair struggling to stay or Dean doing his best to breath. He hated it either way, fueled by it on principle and another harsh yank had Sam himself gagging as his body cried out from a sudden spill of agony he couldn’t find the start of. A little less focus in those moss eyes, a little less fight in that warriors frame even as another thick swell of hell smoke came from John’s mouth. 

But he couldn’t breathe, but his screaming took a different tone then as something deep inside broke apart and tore. His grip faltered and he watched something snap back into his brother’s face just as as he staggered, as Alastair sucked back into the cold corpse of their father with a rib cracking expansion of his chest. Dean knew him in that instant past the pain, the skin crack gold that had begun to bleed and dust lift from Sam’s skin all over again and Dean was all there was, Dean was all that mattered. 

Sam knew better.

“I love you so fucking much.”

Two hands wrapped around his brothers jaw with fingers dirt stained, grip hard enough to dimple the skin and Sam watched the understanding on Dean’s face even as he felt it in his own breathing. It hadn’t been his death he had felt, it had never been his own pain and his own terror he had known, it had always been Dean because anything that had ever been worth a damn had been for Dean. 

“How  _ touching _ .”

A harsh pull and a quick snap, nothing would ever sound quite so final as his brothers neck being broken.

Not a single sound given as Dean’s body hit the ground, and his legs gave out from beneath him instead with the want for a scream. It had built up so wide and wild within him, he could feel it magma burning just beneath the surface and his brother wouldn’t blink ever again for all that he stared. His eyes would dim soon, the rich summer green would glaze with the blindness of death and Sam’s knees hit the ground first for all that the rest of him followed. Hands loose at his sides, his brothers gun against his thigh and that was his tongue not even an arms reach away just like that was his brother not breathing just out of reach. 

“I admire that spirit, I really do. It’ll be delicious to sink my teeth into.”

Alastair stepped over Dean’s body like it was easy, like it didn’t matter, and Sam’s hands curled into fists once more. From the edges of his vision he could see glittering, liquid gold continue to drop from his barbed wire scared just long enough to pool before it went airborne under the warm honey amber light. Castiel had sworn them to be holy, but he wanted to ruin and he wanted to die, and Sam stared at the empty of his brothers eyes even as the demon drew ever closer in familiar boots. 

“You always did work better on your knees, pity I never got to try you.” John’s fingers were just as cold and stiff as he’d thought they would be, lax skin and bloodless tips that swept across his cheek and the scar there to slide through his hair instead. To fist there, to use that graveyard grip to wrench his head back so hard his neck cracked. Too many teeth when he smiled, hazel eyes that might have looked like his in another life, Alastair grinned down at him with a face he’d known all his life and never recognized. “We’ll have to fix. But we’ve got some business to take care of first, Samuel, I’m sure you understand.”

He couldn’t see Dean.

Lifeless and soon to be bloodless, tongueless and without breath but he couldn’t see his brothers body, couldn’t see his eyes. Face down in a summer field and thunderstorm shelter beneath a maple tree canopy, he couldn’t see his brother’s too still form. He couldn’t see the blood washed of his face, the too wide empty of his gaze, it wouldn’t matter anyway because Dean was gone, because Dean wasn’t here anymore, because-

“I’ve waited over a thousand years for this, you holy little bastard.”

_ He couldn’t breathe _ .

Gold dust rising from his skin, a celestial shimmer that took to the gilt tinged air and he sat with a forced arch to his back and his throat exposed. Beneath the ever watchful eyes of he who had died before him and the silent stone weeping of the saint mother where she sat with her candles in the corner, Sam stared up at the demon who would kill him with the righteous burning of heaven in his never human veins. 

“Say  _ ah _ .”

A pop, a boom, a quiet cathedral in Sioux Falls came alive as every door and every window broke free and shattered from the inside in a shower of wood and priceless stained glass that rained down like anointment crystals into the untouched snow. 


	10. Angrec

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All done! Thank you to whoever stuck it out through this story, and thank you for the comments and the kudos! I hope you enjoyed, this was honestly an absolute pleasure to write!

Spring held a delicate taste to it, flavored by brave little crocus that pressed their blossoms out of the still melting snow and creek water that had only just lost some of its ice. Crisp to the touch and filled with the squealing of childrens laughter, life brought up from its winters deep slumber with the promise of cloudless blue skies and peek-a-boo blades of grass. The whole world exhaled as it realized it could breathe again, fresh air and days that would soon grow longer and it set a birdsong in the bones, put a smile on faces grown weather heavy and tired.

Her hair was blonde and she smiled like a slice of the sun, sat on the porch swing in a long sweater that looked like a cloud. Upswept curls and dark eyes, a single foot sent the porch swing swaying, long fingers scratching slow over the long head of a red furred dog with liquid brown eyes that looked ready to drip. Familiar comfortable, the dog curled its too long legs onto the empty side of the swing beside her, head in the woman’s lap while the two swayed and the warming sun slowly promised to that the snow in the days to come. 

“Plan on freezin’ to death out here woman?”

Curling words, gruff, a little heavy at the edges from a hard worked kind of exhaustion that sank into the blood. Time steeped and habitual settled but he smiled, worn ball cap and a ginger beard and he leaned against the door frame like he didn’t have anywhere else he’d rather be. The blonde woman grinned though, dimpled and a little cheeky, tipped sideways until her body sagged between the support chains and the armrest sat snug against her back. Head fallen until she could see him, until the wild tail of her curls bobbed in the crisp spring air and she watched the man upside down where she swayed. 

“We’re perfectly warm, thank you very much.”

Pompous tone but she smiled, little bulbous cuscuta blossoms between her teeth but there was love on her tongue. He reached out, tugged a bit at an irate curl and dusted his fingertips across her temple in the process like he’d never seen anything more beautiful. Like he could stay here, like he could live like this for as long as life would allow him, like no shadows followed in his footsteps and no questionable lack hovered at the edges of his vision. 

Her sharp smile turned sweeter then, full unpainted lips and curving for a kiss she wouldn’t ask for. 

“I don’t want you to get sick is all.”

World weary and his hand curled around her head, fingers slipped into her hair and his thumb swept across her temple still, blue eyes watchful and wide on her face. 

“Bobby, I’m fi-”

_ “Karen.” _

She sighed, smile looser still at the center and her expression somber at the edges like she didn’t know what to do with him. So she reached up instead, hand on his bristled jaw where she could cradle it and a gentle understanding on her brow. That touch slipped to his shirt instead, fingers curled in the neckline where she used that hold to pull him down for a kiss that seemed to settle him more than her. Because he sighed against her mouth, before he pulled away only to put his mouth to her forehead and he lingered there at her brow with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in her hair while her hand slipped instead to the back of his neck. 

“We caught it early, Bobby. I’m going to trust the doctors when they say I’m in remission, but I’m not going to stop living either.”

Soul deep sigh like he’d expected that, and the man stood there a moment longer before straightening slowly, slipping her elastic from her hair just to watch the way she scowled at him. 

“Go call Rufus, see if he wants to come over for dinner. Rosie and I are going to keep enjoying the sunshine.”

She shooed him away like that, pulled herself back up so she could brace her back on the swing instead while the greyhound crawled a little further up her lap. He stood there a moment, watched her where she lounged with her eyes closed and her fingers working slow patterns over the dogs sleek head before he smiled and headed back inside. 

Wild geraniums bloomed in the flicker blink space behind his bare feet, lily of the valley on his unfrosted breath, the Messiah stood clothed in a loose garb of white within the snow, unbothered by the chill. For his shoulders were unburdened and a gentle smile danced upon his wide mouth as the quiet splendor of humanity pooled within his lungs from every breath he didn’t need to take. For he had walked this town with unbound feet just as he had through every other, but there was a particular kind of nostalgia ever unseen that licked at his everlasting bones now where it hadn’t before. 

Knuckles brushed against his, fingers tangled, and he smiled a little warmer, a little more liquid honeysuckle sweet even as he leaned into the touch. Cotton swatch bandaged across his eyes and through his hair and glittering liquid gold dripped from beneath the wrapping, down his cheeks like glimmering tears that never ceased. Soft petaled and hardy, yellow tulips sprouted from the snow wherever drops of gold managed to fall and he held that hand for all that his heart ached. 

“They’re so happy.”

Quiet words in a summer sun voice, soft curling and the young Messiah couldn’t help his faint melancholy. He didn’t need to see them to know that, the sorrow and the suffering and the splendor of the world all the more pure without the carefully practiced masks that humans wore to shield themselves. What need had he of sight when the Prophet guided his steps and kept gentle hold of his hand, silent encouragement now just as he had been in another light. 

No words from his golden thread stitched mouth but mossy eyes blinked unbidden at the Messiah where he stood. No words would be enough, no words would encompasse the things he wanted to say, so the Prophet simply held his hand instead with a want to never let go. A gentle guidance instead, soft pressure pulling the savior everlasting from another person who would never know them and more tulips bloomed to golden sunlit life.

“Yeah. Let’s go home, I miss your voice.”

He didn’t smile but the other wouldn’t see, and instead the Prophet gazed instead at the woman on the porch and the dog that watched them despite the distance that separated them. Just a moment longer, just long enough to feel the soft ache in his rose etched ribs before he pulled them away, turned their backs and gave his gaze to the barefooted Messiah in the snow instead. 

Carthage was green, green summer hot and sweet green grass swaying with a blue, blue sky sprawling high above through the canopy branches of the oak trees. Low slung porch and flowering lilac bushes lining its stretch, there were verbena growing wild in the yard and he wanted to make a wreath of him, wanted to push his brother down in them like he couldn’t a lifetime ago. Sunlight in his hair and sunlight for his eyes, Sam was gilded and golden and Dean licked his lips before cupping a hand at the back of his brothers skull, before pulling him in for a kiss like he’d wanted to do since they’d left home to walk in a world that wouldn’t remember them. 

He had groused about it once, scowl on his lips and a panting brother spread out beneath him, but Sam had just smiled, had just taken his face in both of his long fingered hands and kissed him with a gasping mouth. 

_ As long as I’ve got you to remember me, I don’t care if anybody else ever knows my name. _

His brother leaned into him now, holy fire caught and cherished in a holy place like Dean had never managed to do with his bare hands but he tasted that mouth and knew Heaven like the sanctuary around them could never manage on its own. Sam’s hands in the front of his shirt, Sam’s breath in his lungs and his brothers skin was hot sun freckled, but his mouth was wide and smiling even though the smear of their kiss. A millennia laid out before them and Dean wasn’t sure he would ever get used to being this happy, this lucky for all that Cas swore they deserved it and more. 

“Let's invite Dad and Cas over for dinner.”

Words against his brothers mouth and Sam’s flicker fire eyes watched him from beneath sun golden lashes, slashing dimples in his cheeks and a cut of white teeth that Dean knew the feel of on his skin. 

“Okay.”

 


End file.
